[Mailman-Users] New to Mailman -- Dropped messages to list owner's own email -- SOLVED!

[Scott Courtney]

Greetings, list members!

You may have heard my shout of triumph right over the Internet. I woke up
this morning with the answer to this problem in my head. It is, as with most
such things, a really simple problem and the answer was staring me in the face
the whole time.

To recap the problem: My lists were all working perfectly, except that *I* was
not receiving posts. The mail to the lists was being filtered from my own
login account using procmail.

My procmail filters were built on the assumption that mail from my personal
address, (e.g., "me at mydomain.com") to one of my lists ("mylist at mydomain.com")
would reach Mailman and would emerge as mail from "me at mydomain.com" to
"me at mydomain.com". I was forgetting that the "To:" header DOESN'T CHANGE when
Mailman forwards the message. Only the *envelope* address changes, to allow the
output of Mailman to be accurately delivered to me.

As an email admin for several years, I *knew* that. I have no idea what caused
me to go blind to this simple fact as I configured procmail. <sigh> Not enough
coffee, I guess.

Anyway, for the record and for the benefit of anyone reading this thread in the
archives, the root of the problem was that messages sent out by Mailman to me
were going back into Mailman as a result of the "To:" header still pointing to
the list. Mailman was finding the "X-BeenThere:" header and (correctly) sending
the message to /dev/null, so to speak.

Solution:

At the beginning of ~/.procmailrc, add the following lines:

:0:
* ^X-BeenThere:.*$
$DEFAULT

That's it! Adding these three lines made everything work perfectly. The only
catch is that this rule has to be at the very top of the .procmailrc file,
prior to any Mailman-related rules.

Thanks to all, especially Raquel, for the replies to my question on-list. You
folks got me asking the basic questions again, and I thereby found the obvious
problem hidden inside its mask of subtle symptoms. :-)

Kind regards,

Scott 

-- 
-----------------------+------------------------------------------------------
Scott Courtney         | "I don't mind Microsoft making money. I mind them
courtney at 4th.com       | having a bad operating system."    -- Linus Torvalds
http://www.4th.com/    | ("The Rebel Code," NY Times, 21 February 1999)