[Mailman-Users] odd problem with mailman holding mail in outgoing queue

[Alan McKay]

Hey folks,

I've been running a FreeBSD / Postfix / Mailman list server for some 7
or 8 years now.   The last time I updated FreeBSD was about 3 years
ago so it is only at 6.0.   That was also the last time I updated
Postfix and Mailman until this recent spat of problems which prompted
me to upgrade both to the latest stable versions (as of yesterday).
So 2.1.13 in the case of Mailman.

Things have been running fine on this server for years with nary an
issue.   I have not made any changes recently, so it was quite
troublesome when this problem started a few days ago.   My lists
started experiencing 10 and 12 hour delays between mail coming in, and
going back out again.  If I look at message headers I can see Postfix
gets the message, then hands off to mailman, then it sits there for
hours on end, and finally gets sent out.

I should mention that this is a pretty lightly loaded system.  The
lists are basically personal hobby lists - the busiest of which gets
maybe 100 to 200 emails a day.  It is also a web server but traffic is
pretty light.  Load average is usually under 1.

I spent a good 12 to 14 hours yesterday looking into this - went
through some of the archives for this list, as well as the FAQ wiki.
Found a few similar problems but nothing just the same.

I look in the Mailman logs dir.   Nothing really onerous that I see.
I look in smtp and see what looks like normal processing.  e.g. one of
my lists looks like it had a number of messages just a few minutes
ago, but I have not seen them yet where normally I would expect to see
them almost instantly.

Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<3f1854170912301503l375e2259k439e633f55b8bffa at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.055 seconds
Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<3f1854170912301511m39e7eb9djc157df16d753bef1 at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.041 seconds
Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<6e40ba2b0912301514j5bbd84b5maef5a93e4c46b11 at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.053 seconds
Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<54a6f3cb0912301520r2dd77b03i5ebd8492b4af5bbc at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.040 seconds
Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<b9ff8c7d0912301529r1411fbdtb1860e06ef539bb0 at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.050 seconds
Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805)
<8d0a26d70912301627o1571ababscf8396703e9bbb27 at mail.gmail.com> smtp to
brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.052 seconds

smtp-failure seems to contain not much else other than reports of
bogus email addresses.  I've used this as an opportunity to weed out
most of them, but there are still messages that had been queued up for
them so I'm not sure how long it will take those to fail delivery.
For example if I "tail -10000" (ten thousand) that file and grep out
the 5 main bogus email addresses, I get one single line :

Jan 04 12:07:50 2010 (50034) Low level smtp error: (4, 'Interrupted
system call'), msgid:
<b100e8e71001021626l470dc99fmcea7aceba072823b at mail.gmail.com>

But i have been unable to find out what this means.   But given that I
only see it once I am not too worried about it really.

Can someone tell me where to look as to why stuff is getting backed up
in the outgoing queue?



-- 
“Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV”
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"