[Mailman-Users] Mailman with sendmail smtp-failure (solved)

[Curt Siffert]

Hi, I am setting up Mailman with sendmail and apache2, and when I try  
to subscribe an address to the list with "send notifications to  
subscriber" turned on, I never receive the email.

logs/smtp says:

Feb 18 01:08:17 2007 (77993) <mailman. 
0.1171789696.78619.mailman at sub.domain.net> smtp to mailman for 1  
recips, completed in 0.018 seconds

logs/smtp-failure says:

Feb 18 01:08:17 2007 (77993) SMTP session failure: 553, 5.3.0  
<mailman-bounces at sub.domain.net>... User unknown, msgid: <mailman. 
0.1171789696.78619.mailman at sub.domain.net>

I'm trying to figure out how to push the email through and I'm  
stuck.  What could the problem be?

(...)

In the process of writing this email, I figured out the problem.  I  
figured I'd send this anyway for future google searches.

Many sendmail utilities automatically put a catchall in virtusertable:
@sub.domain.net	error:nouser User unknown

So even though you wouldn't normally have to put entries in  
virtusertable, you do in this case, BEFORE the catchall, since  
virtusertable is interpreted before the aliases file.  So once I put:

mailman at sub.domain.net         mailman
mailman-admin at sub.domain.net   mailman-admin
mailman-bounces at sub.domain.net mailman-bounces
mailman-confirm at sub.domain.net mailman-confirm
mailman-join at sub.domain.net    mailman-join
mailman-leave at sub.domain.net   mailman-leave
mailman-owner at sub.domain.net   mailman-owner
mailman-request at sub.domain.net mailman-request
mailman-subscribe at sub.domain.net       mailman-subscribe
mailman-unsubscribe at sub.domain.net     mailman-unsubscribe

in the virtusertable and reran /etc/mail/make, things started working.

The mailman documentation doesn't mention this.