[Mailman-Users] no mail delivery to site list

[Mark Sapiro]

On 05/09/2013 05:59 PM, Larry Kuenning wrote:
> On 5/9/2013 12:55 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> 
>> What's in the aliases, transport and virtual files in
>> /var/spool/postfix/plesk/?
> 
> Well, that's what they used to call the $64000 question.  These are all
> Berkeley Database .db files, which I've never worked with before.  If I
> knew how to read these files (and understand their content, and edit
> them where necessary) I might be able to solve the whole problem from
> there.


There should be both an aliases (plain text) and an aliases.db
(database) and likewise for virtual(.db) and transport(.db). The .db
files are made from the plain text files by the Postfix commands
postalias in the case of aliases and postmap in the case of the others.

If those plain text files aren't in the same directory, they are
somewhere, but I can't imagine why they're not there. You might try
locate or find to find them.


>> Also, what's in /etc/postfix/master.cf?
> 
> #
> # Postfix master process configuration file.  For details on the format
> # of the file, see the master(5) manual page (command: "man 5 master").
[...]
> mailman unix - n n - - pipe flags=R user=mailman:mailman
> argv=/usr/lib64/plesk-9.0/postfix-mailman ${nexthop} ${user} ${recipient}


OK, so Plesk has it's own transport for Mailman, possibly related to the
(hated by me) postfix_to_mailman.py <http://wiki.list.org/x/EYDt>

So we need to see the aliases, virtual and transport files in order to
know exactly what addresses are delivered via the 'mailman' transport
and why the 'mailman' list addresses aren't among them.

Or, maybe (thinking diabolically here) Plesk's postfix-mailman process
just discards that mail.


> I would most like to find out how to get into those .db files.


You shouldn't have to. The plain text source must be somewhere.


> Failing
> that, I wonder if it would do any good to delete the site list from the
> command line and recreate it using Plesk (which seems to produce usable
> lists on this system).  But can this be done safely?  Doesn't it say
> somewhere that Mailman won't run if the site list doesn't exist?  (It
> would have to go out of existence briefly in order to recreate it.)


You could do that and as long as my diabolical conjecture is not in
play, it should work. It is safe as long as it doesn't take forever and
isn't done when cron/mailpasswds is running as that 'sends from' the
site list and requires it.

The other process that requires the site list is mailmanctl which
refuses to start Mailman if there's no site list, but it won't notice if
the list disappears after the qrunners are running.

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