[Mailman-Users] Mailman stop delivering ... problem withApproval.py?

[SML]

> >The mailman lists on my server have suddenly stopped delivering
> >mail. 
> 
> And what update to Mailman or Python was installed just before this
> happened?

There was no update to either Mailman or Python ... but one of the
lists was hit with a *massive* amount of spam that caused "too many
files open" error, this same spam attack eventually caused the
server to run out of memory :(
 
> The above import has been in Approve.py since 2.1.0. Something else
> in your system changed.

When creating a temp list for a testing sandbox the Import errors were
replaced by "AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute
'get_sender' errors," and then all errors stopped and the lists on
the server started working again.

My assumption is that Mailman was using up server resources to deal
with spam and a (few) files got corrupted, which files
were then recompiled on the creation of a new list.

I'm now sending all mail to the list owner to dev/null and am
content filtering and discarding mail with images ... I'm hoping that
that will reduce the amount of resources that Mailman needs should
another load hit.

One interesting thing, the qfiles/shunt/*.pck files were owned:group
by mailman:mailman, but the most recent "AttributeError" .pck files
are owned:group root:mailman. How is it that Mailman started writing
files with root as the owner? 

> See
> <http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq06.011.htp>
> for the reason why I can't be more helpful.

Yeah. I appreciate the time you've been able to give.  Thanks.