[Mailman-Users] Why do my posts to own mailman list disappear.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Paul Arenson/tokyoprogressive writes:

 > Actually I am not sure what PTR is…..but my reseller hosting is
 > just that, I pay for space from EZPZ and then can do as described
 > above.

Ah, sorry.  PTR is the pointer record from a numeric IP address to a
human-readable domain name.

 > I see. Not sure exactly what that means….but thanks...

If you don't know, and don't care, no problem.  If you want the long
story, just ask. :-)

 > > That said there are a few long shots you could try to diagnose it
 > > yourself.  One is a manual transaction with the mailserver and see if
 > > it's being rejected at the SMTP level.
 > 
 > What would I need to do?

Give me an existing address, which you already did.  :-)  I just sent
you a test message from steve at turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp, and it was
accepted "OK" by nangoku-jiyu-jin-net (which again identified itself
as dionysus).  So it's not a problem at the incoming SMTP level, mail
is going in to the host.

 > Nothing changed at all in my list.

No changes to the host configuration (general spam filters, etc) that
you know of, either, right?

 > It was working with no problems for 2 years.  Recently I have been
 > getting a lot of spam, so when a sufficient number had built up I
 > went in and got rid of it using BAN so-and-so, DISCARD, so and so…

You mean in the Mailman moderation interface for the list, right?
Theoretically you could have sent mail, it got spamtrapped but you
didn't notice the your post never appeared on the list, you banned the
author and didn't notice it was you, etc, etc.  Doesn't seem likely.

It would be much more likely if you entered patterns by hand in the
Privacy -> {Sender,Recipient,Spam} Filter screens.  (I don't know if
cPanel has those, that's what they are called in unmodified Mailman.)
But I guess you didn't do that?

 > Yes, both paul at nangoku-jiyu-jin.net
 > <mailto:paul at nangoku-jiyu-jin.net> and paul at turnlefthosting.org
 > <mailto:paul at turnlefthosting.org> work when sent mail from another
 > address.
 > 
 > BUT it is going on 5 minutes that I sent mail FROM each of those
 > addresses to themselves and they did NOT arrive.

How do you do that?  By setting the From and To addresses in your
local mail client, and sending via smtp.comcast.net?  Or do you have
webmail running on nangoku-jiyu-jin.net, or ... ?

 > They show up in their respective SENT folders and I get no error
 > message.

Do you have a copy of an old message sent through your list, with all
headers intact (I want to look at the Received headers)?  I don't need
the content, just the headers, but if the content is innocuous, just
forward the whole message to me.

 > This sounds like NOT a MAILMAN problem…

I agree.

 > http://nangoku-jiyu-jin.net/mailman/listinfo/tokyoprogressive_nangoku-jiyu-jin.net

Everything looks good there.  Not that there's all that much, but it
looks like the admin addresses etc in the mailto links are right and
the archive link works, and the admin link works (although as expected
it's not very helpful since I can't log in).

 > > Are your lists archived?

Thanks, I found them.  Unfortunately, they don't have the trace
headers (Received) in them (and they wouldn't have the outgoing hops
anyway).  So they weren't much help.

 > You are in Japan by any chance? You know the term “kechi”.  There
 > is an historian on Japanese history with your name, but wait, there
 > is an academic at Tsukuba with the same name.  (I was there for two
 > years starting in 2009 or 10).

I'm the latter, in the Policy and Planning Sciences department.

 > I wonder….EZPZ is pretty big, but i guess that doesn’t necessarily
 > mean anything….Also, this is an installation from the Softaculous
 > package, so I doubt they even support it.

How do you install something unsupported if you don't have a shell
account?  I'm curious because maybe you do have a shell account but
don't know it. :-)

Steve