[Mailman-Users] mails disappear between postfix and mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

On 3/11/2012 8:42 AM, Lupin5th at gmx.net wrote:
> 
> I´m hoping someone can point me in the right direction with this:
> I´m using mailman version 2.1.13, on ubuntu lts 10.4.4, mta is postfix.
> Mailman is installed, lists are configured, everything should theoretically be fine. When I send a mail to one of the lists, postfix logs "status=sent (delivered via mailman service)" but no mail ever arrives. neither does mailman log anything in /var/log/mailman/


Several points. The 'mailman' service is undoubtedly the 3rd party
postfix_to_mailman.py which is officially not supported by the GNU
Mailman project.

Please see the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/OIDD>.

Is Mailman running? Did you run Mailman's 'bin/mailmanctl start' or
'service mailman start' or however you start Mailman in your package.

Have you looked in Mailman's qfiles/in/ directory to see if the messages
are there? They will be *.pck files that you can examine with Mailman's
bin/dumpdb or bin/show_qfiles.


> I´m guessing this means the mails never arrive to be handled by mailman, but shouldn´t this produce some reaction (aka not "status sent") in postfix?


Postfix delivered the message to the mailman transport (presumably
postfix_to_mailman.py). Normally, it will inform Postfix of an error if
it can't deliver the mail to Mailman and Postfix will report it. There
are several possibilities:

The 'mailman' transport is misconfigured in Postfix in such a way that
it silently fails.

postfix_to_mailman.py is broken in some way that causes it to silently fail.

postfix_to_mailman.py delivered the mail to Mailman and Mailman isn't
running so the mail still sits in Mailman's queue

Mailman silently fails (highly unlikely).

Mailman noisily fails and its logs are in some directory other than
/var/log/mailman/.

If you ever started Mailman, there should be at least a qrunner log. If
there isn't, you're looking in the wrong directory for logs or you never
started Mailman.

Also see the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/A4E9>, but section 3
(aliases) doesn't apply if you are using postfix_to_mailman.py, and
section 4 (smrsh) doesn't apply to Postfix at all.

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