[Mailman-Users] Tracking a message that dissappeared

[Mark Sapiro]

Petersen, Kirsten J wrote:

>I'm looking for some help finding out why a message was not delivered to
>one of our lists.  
>
>We're running Mailman 2.1.10 on Debian.
>
>I tracked the message from our postfix relays to the Mailman server,
>where I see the following in the smtp log:
>
>smtp.1:Nov 12 17:27:08 2008 (6917)
><mailman.50515.1226539627.6914.outages at lists.oregonstate.edu> smtp to
>outages for 1 recips, completed in 0.037 seconds


This is not the message to Mailman. It is some kind of notice being
sent from Mailman to someone (the Message-ID is a Mailman generated
message id). It may be a reject notice to a poster or a notice of some
kind to the list owner or completely unrelated to the 'missing' post.


>There are no other log entries for that message - nothing in vette or
>error.  But the message never came to the list.  There were no pending
>moderation requests, it's not in the list archive and obviously the
>subscribers didn't receive it.


All of which is consistent with a rejected post.


>Another message was sent to the list a few minutes later, and delivered
>successfully:
>
>smtp.1:Nov 12 17:39:06 2008 (6917)
><7B4268E5ACB878429B58D4BE5B780E8301BA8A4F at NWS-EXCH2.nws.oregonstate.edu>
>smtp to outages for 181 recips, completed in 0.190 seconds
>
>
>The first message was sent to "outages at oregonstate.edu", an alias for
>the list address.  The "require_explicit_destination" setting is set to
>"No".  The second message was sent to the actual list address,
>outages at lists.oregonstate.edu, and was delivered normally.
>
>So why did the first message only go to "1 recips"?  Are there any other
>logs that I can check to discover what went wrong?


The message to 1 recipient was not the post. As I said above, it was a
mailman generated notice, possibly about the post. Find this message
in your MTA logs and see who it was delivered to for clues. If it is a
rejected post, there won't be anything else in Mailman's logs.

My best guess is the post was rejected for some reason and the message
to 1 recipient was the rejection notice.

It seems unlikely that the rejection is related to the address to which
the message was sent.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan