[Mailman-Users] Is it OK to unshunt "bad" messages?

[Sebastian Hagedorn]

--On 25. April 2008 10:16:27 -0700 Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> Sebastian Hagedorn wrote:
>|
>| No, it was a .pck file. I found this entry in the vette log:
>|
>| (3438) Message discarded, msgid: <c39b437d2808.47ee2e26 at wmich.edu>
>
>
> This should have nothing to do with anything in the 'bad' queue.

But it was definitely that message!

> This
> message is logged when a handler decides to discard an incoming post,
> e.g. a post from a non-member in discard_these_nonmembers or any other
> condition with a discard action.

That's what I thought initially, but how did it end up in "bad" then? Could 
it be caused by this patch to 2.1.9 that I applied on March 8:

                syslog('error', 'Ignoring unparseable message: %s',filebase)
 +             self._switchboard.finish(filebase)

I see this line in "error" shortly after the message that I found in "bad" 
arrived:

Mar 29 17:01:05 2008 (3438) Ignoring unparseable message: 
1206806465.417665+d798425535212058c480aebf7900add235ac4cb9
Mar 29 17:01:05 2008 (3438) Ignoring unparseable message: 
1206806465.4255731+c874adc58f17010096988e4e388e31260a56677a

But how can I tell what messages those really are?

> How old was the file you unshunted or how old was the message in it?

The message was from March 29. I wouldn't have bothered unshunting it, but 
it seemed as though it might still be relevant. Unfortunately I don't 
remember the timestamp of the file and now it's gone, of course.

> The list name isn't logged in the case of the vette log entry, because
> whoever created that code didn't think it would be useful or just didn't
> think to do it (You could find the message-id in the MTA log if you
> really wanted to know the list).

That's true.

> Changing long standing log messages is
> not something to be done lightly as it potentially breaks peoples log
> analysis tools.

I can see that, but still I'd put it on my wishlist for 2.2 or 3.0, because 
it's happened a few times that list admins complained about "lost 
messages". It would've been much easier to see that mail to those lists had 
been discarded if the list name had been logged. The way it is now we first 
had to look at the MTA's log and then search the error log for the 
message-id. And when a single message is sent to more than one list, that 
still doesn't necessarily tell you the whole story ...

>|> You should really look in the 'error' log to see the message associated
>|> with preserving the entry.
>|
>| There was nothing in "error", only that line in "vette".
>
> This is not surprising given that this is Mailman 2.1.9, as I think that
> means the message must have been quite old.

Not that old ...
-- 
     .:.Sebastian Hagedorn - RZKR-R1 (Gebäude 52), Zimmer 18.:.
Zentrum für angewandte Informatik - Universitätsweiter Service RRZK
.:.Universität zu Köln / Cologne University - ✆ +49-221-478-5587.:.
                   .:.:.:.Skype: shagedorn.:.:.:.
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