[Mailman-Users] Is this a mailman or postfix error?

[John Dennis]

On Thu, 2005-07-28 at 16:28 -0500, roy vinner wrote:
> Greetings!
> 
> I have a problem that any address which is supposed to be resolved with
> the path-to-mailman/data/aliases produces a "message undeliverable" error.
> 
> I've also discovered that if I run an alias expansion from the command line
> 
> aliases:
> ..............................................
> # STANZA START: try
> # CREATED: Mon Jul 25 17:19:03 2005
> try:             "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post try"
> try-admin:       "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin try"
> try-bounces:     "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces try"
> try-confirm:     "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman confirm try"
> try-join:        "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman join try"
> try-leave:       "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman leave try"
> try-owner:       "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman owner try"
> try-request:     "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request try"
> try-subscribe:   "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe try"
> try-unsubscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe try"
> # STANZA END: try
> ..........
> 
> [mailman at nrg mailman-2.1.6]$ /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request try
> Failure to find group name mailman.  Try adding this group
> to your system, or re-run configure, providing an
> existing group name with the command line option --with-mail-gid.
> 
> I have re-run mailman's configure as requested by the above message and
> group mailman does exist on my machine. I am clueless as to what is awry
> here with postfix aliases? Is this a postfix or mailman problem?
> 
> Let me know if you need any more information for logs or config files.

There are two immediate things to check:

1) I know you said it, but please verify the mailman uid and gid:

# id mailman

2) Postfix has a "feature" which is it will run the commands found in an
alias file under the identity of the alias file. What is the owner/group
of the alias file:

# ls -l path-to-mailman/data/aliases

if its group does not match what the mailman wrapper is configured for
you'll get group mismatch problems because postfix will attempt to run
the mailman alias commands under the group belonging to the alias file,
not to the mail_owner in postfix's main.cf file. I think I recall a
config variable to turn the postfix behavior off, but you should not do
that because mailman should be creating the alias file and hence it
should match the uid/gid, but if you hand created it, then all bets are
off.
-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>