[Mailman-Users] qfiles/shunt

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Con Wieland writes:

 > I do not understand how thinks end up here. I thought shunting was  
 > done before the message went to the archive but this particular list  
 > has no archive. Can someone help me understand why this was shunted?  
 > Does that mean it wasn't sent to the list?

Yes, it means it was not sent to the list.

IIRC, a message is shunted when Mailman detects an error condition
that it cannot handle.  It is removed from the regular flow of traffic
(thus "shunt"), and placed in a separate queue for the admin to
handle.  It has no specific connection to archiving, but if the
message causes an error in Mailman, it's probably not appropriate for
distribution or archiving, so this happens before archiving.

A typical cause for shunting is when the message is malformed (illegal
characters in header fields, missing separators for attachments, etc).
I didn't see anything like that in the message you enclosed, but there
may be other reasons for shunts that I've never run into.

The only other thing I can think of is that messages held in the
moderation interface for the site admin to deal with might end up in
the shunt "queue".  (It's not really a queue since Mailman will never
process something there until the admin unshunts it manually.)  The
message does show an indication that the moderator rejected it.