[Mailman-Users] need help with mm-handler contrib

[Richard Barrett]

At 01:01 17/01/2003, Jeff  Schoby wrote:
>Hi all, newly converted majordomo heathen here....
>
>I -think- I followed the instructions right.....however, for some
>reason when I create the list in the web interface, the aliases don't
>get added to the virtual user table and emails to the new list I create
>bounce back as 'user unknown'

The point of mm-handler is that aliases for lists do not have to be added 
to any file. The mm-handler script that is called by sendmail to deliver 
essentially all the mail it receives looks in Mailman's runtime directory 
structure for certain files associated with valid lists to determine 
whether the target mail alias is valid. If it is the mm-handler calls the 
Mailman delivery script.

>let me know what info you guys need.  using slackware 8.x with sendmail
>and the latest stable mailman, python, and apache

Although I used mm-handler I'm no sendmail expert and expertise with 
sendmail is what I found to be at a premium in getting it working. A couple 
of questions you could look at:

1. Does the mail log being generated by sendmail show that the mm-handler 
mailer is actually being used by sendmail in an attempt to deliver. If not 
then that is your first problem. I found I had to do a bit a lot of 
fiddling to get sendmail set up on my system, including having to hack the 
m4 code that generates the sendmail.cf, before sendmail started calling 
mm-handler.

2. Did you set the $MMWRAPPER and $MMLISTDIR variables in the mm-handler 
perl script that tell it where to find the Mailman's runtime directory 
structure.

You should be aware that the way mm-handler interacts with the mailman 
delivery scripts is inadequate in its error handling and there is a clear 
and present danger of mail being silently dropped on the floor if the 
mailman delivery script fails. This is not good; been their and still got 
the scars from the beating I took as a consequence. The author of the 
mm-handler contrib knows of this and may have developed an enhanced script.

I do not want to bias you but there is an alternative version of this which 
implements the sendmail mailer in Python and is more robust in its error 
handling. This is posted as Mailman patch #644810 (and a precursor patch 
#644797). Patch #644810 includes a file README.SENDMAIL.mailer which may 
help you. It includes information about steps I had to take when getting 
mm-handler working before I decided to do it in Python,