[Mailman-Users] Strange looping notification

[Steve Burling]

We have a list that's acting up, and I'm hoping that the assembled wisdom 
can help me figure out what's going on.

Mailman 2.1.4 running on Solaris.  The Web server and the various Mailman 
qrunners run on one machine, the mail server is a different machine.  The 
mailman directory is cross-mounted via NFS so that both machines can see 
it.

(Now that I think about it, I can't remember why it's set up this way -- I 
didn't do the initial Mailman 2.0.x install, and just followed that pattern 
when upgrading to Mailman 2.1.4.  Is there any reason that I should think 
about moving the qrunners to run on the mail server?  Things *do* seem to 
be working...)

Anyway, on the strange behavior...

We have a list where all the members are moderated, so that all postings 
have to be approved before they are distributed.  We recently started 
running BrightMail to filter out SPAM, and added a SPAM filter to the 
list's configuration, with an action of "hold".  What happens now is that a 
piece of mail comes in to the list, BrightMail flags it as SPAM, Mailman's 
SPAM filter matches and holds the message, mail is sent to the moderators 
notifying them of the held message, and then Mailman begins talking to 
itself.  That is, there's an endless series of messages, sent from the 
"listname-owner" address *to* the "listname-owner" address, each attaching 
all the previous messages -- one of the notifications I got had 39 parts, 
where each part seemed to include all the previous notifications.  On the 
Mailman "admindb" page for the list

I'm having a difficult time:

    a) Figuring out why this is happening
    b) Even describing it rationally

I've changed the action for the SPAM filter to "discard", to see whether 
there's some confusion going on between the "hold for moderation" and the 
"hold because it matched a SPAM filter".

Any advice gratefully accepted...

-- 
Steve Burling                                    <mailto:srb at umich.edu>
University of Michigan, ICPSR                    Voice: +1 734 615.3779
330 Packard Street                               FAX:   +1 734 647.8700
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2910