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

[Mark Sapiro]

Alan McKay wrote:
>
>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


Those messages have been delivered to the MTA. If the list has just 3
eligible recipients, that looks backlogged but otherwise normal. If
the messages haven't been delibvered, check the MTA (mailq or
whatever).


>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?


Your MTA is checking too much during SMTP from Mailman. It shouldn't be
doing address verification or even domain verification on remote
recipients.

What is in Mailman's out/ and retry/ queues at this point? The out/
queue is almost certainly backlogged.

You could try moving all the out/ and retry/ queue entries aside and
then removing the bad addresses from them with the script at
<http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/remove_recips> and then replacing the
entries a few at a time.

If the system is still slow, search the faq at
<http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3> for "performance".

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