[Mailman-Users] attempting to post to the FAQ page Mailman FAQ Edit Wizard

[Brad Knowles]

At 9:19 AM -0700 2005-05-06, Carl Zwanzig wrote:

>  For (b), the message will be attempted to all members that aren't marked
>  as 'nomail', and you can reasonably be sure that's happening. What you
>  can't see at the mailman level is whether the sending MTA is able to
>  deliver the message (after getting it from mailman). You really need to
>  be looking at the MTA logs.

	You need to look at the Mailman logs to see which addresses that 
Mailman attempted to deliver to, and you need to look at the MTA logs 
to see what actually happened to those attempts.  However, you will 
probably need privileged site-admin access to the server where the 
mailing list is hosted, and you will only be able to look at the logs 
at the command-line shell prompt.

	And believe me, it can be really hairy trying to figure out just 
exactly what the final disposition of a given message can be, since 
your MTA may or may not make clear in the logs as to what is a 
success, what is a delay, what is a bounce, whether or not the 
queue-ids are the same, etc....  And then there are the messages that 
were delivered by your local MTA to the remote MTA, but which were 
then bounced by the remote MTA and sent back to your machine.


	With years of mail systems administration experience, you can 
usually manage to pull all the puzzle pieces together, but for anyone 
else it can be a real nightmare.  Solving this problem is quite a bit 
more complex than it would seem on first glance.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.