[Mailman-Users] Changing Contact Mailing Address

[Staven Bruce]

Hi John,

You are correct, I am using sendmail for the MTA. I reviewed your post and
again you were correct in that I had not restarted the sendmail service
after changing the aliases file and regenerating it with the 'newaliases'
command. So I tried your suggestions, however my results were the same as
before.

After I commented out the mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman
entries from my aliases file and left 
the aliases that pipe into /var/mailman/mail/mailman, I regenerated the
aliases file and then restarted the sendmail service. However, even after
all that, any mail sent to mailman at mydomain.com was not sent to me and
seemed to disappear. 

I then returned to my aliases file and uncommented out the
mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman entries and instead commented
out the first /var/mailman/mail/mailman entry under the 'mailman' mailaing
list that reads 'mailman: |/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman'. Once I
did this, I regenerated the aliases file and restarted the sendmail service.
At this point, any mail sent to mailman at mydomain.com came directly to me.

My personal guess is that for whatever reason I think the 'mailman:
|/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman' entry is either not refering to a
valid defined alias or perphaps to an alias that is not defined at all? I'm
not sure where the definition of '/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman'
is, however I am going to look around. I would really appreciate any
additional information you might have or suggestions you could pass along.


-----Original Message-----
From: John Dennis [mailto:jdennis at redhat.com]
Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 8:46 AM
To: Staven Bruce
Cc: mailman-users at python.org
Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Changing Contact Mailing Address


On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 15:35 -0700, Staven Bruce wrote:
> Ok, so I've figured my issue out, but I would really appreciate someone
> explianing to me what's happening. I'm using Mailman version 2.1.5 on Red
> Hat Enterprise 3.0 update 4. Originally, Mailman made two entries in
> /etc/aliases under 'Mailman Aliases':
> 
> 	#mailman aliases
> 
> 	mailman:        postmaster
> 	mailman-owner: mailman
> 
> However when I set up the recommended 'Mailman' site list, these two
entries
> were duplicated under 'Mailman Mailing List':
> 
> 	#mailman mailing list
> 	mailman:              "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman"
> 	mailman-owner:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailman"
> 
> As a result, /etc/aliases was complaining about having identical aliases.
So
> what I decided to comment out one of the duplicate entries. 
> 
> However, what I found was that if I commented out the 'mailman' entry
under
> the 'Mailman Aliases' section, any mail sent to mailman at mydomain.com
> **seemed** to disappear. It wasn't sent to me, it wasn't returned and it
> wasn't held in the MTA que. 
> 
> But then I found if I uncommented the 'mailman' entry under the 'Mailman
> Aliases' section and commented out the 'mailman' entry under the 'Mailman
> Mailng List' section, then mail sent to mailman at mydomain.com was delivered
> to me with no problem. So, now I'm just trying to figure out why this
> happens? Any ideas?

It's clearly wrong to have the duplicate aliases defined. I went back to
see where the original "mailman: postmaster" aliases came from because
our mailman rpm does not create these. In fact, I'm pretty sure these
aliases are from a much earlier version of mailman (2.0.x?). It turns
out that the "setup" rpm which is responsible for installing core files
installs a default version of /etc/aliases which include these
deprecated mailman aliases. I have filed a bug report against setup so
these aliases are not created when the system is first setup. This is
the bugzilla.

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155841

However, I'm not sure I can explain the behavior you're seeing, but here
is the bottom line, the mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman
should be deleted from your aliases file, the aliases that pipe
into /var/mailman/mail/mailman are the ones you want to keep. You didn't
say which MTA you were using, I assume its sendmail. When you were
experimenting did you regenerate your aliases and restart sendmail? In
any event make sure you remember to do that after you delete the bogus
aliases.

Although on my test machines I have the duplicate bogus mailman aliases
as a result of the setup rpm I've never had a problem which is why I
probably never noticed this. However, I use postfix as my MTA which
might overwrite the duplicate alias with the 2nd correct version thus
masking the problem, but thats just a theory.

If after you delete the bogus aliases and rebuild the aliases and
restart your MTA you're still having problems let me know.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>