[Mailman-Users] mailman/sendmail process /var/spool/mail content

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Mark Sapiro writes:
 > On 02/05/2016 07:15 AM, ssn at ebi.ac.uk wrote:
 > > 
 > > We had an issue with the mailman server which is now back and running,
 > > mqueue is empty however /var/spool/mail contains many hundreds of files
 > > containing an email that was not posted during the period we had an
 > > issue. Is there way to process these with mailman?
 > 
 > 
 > So during some period, the MTA was delivering list mail to mboxes in
 > /var/spool/mail instead of to Mailman. Is that correct?

It sounds to me like this is Sendmail's out queue.  I don't use
Sendmail so don't know how its queues are structured in the
filesystem, but the OP makes it sound like many copies of *one* post
("an email").

What system user is listed as the owner of the files?  What are the
names of the files?  Are they readable, related to the lists or other
addresses?  Or are they UUIDs or hashes or serial numbers?

Check the files for the presence of Mailman-specific headers
(List-Post, List-Id, X-Been-There, X-Mailman-Version, etc).  If
any such header is present, Mailman has already processed the post.
However, Mailman should never touch /var/spool/mail.

If it is Sendmail's doing, you would use Sendmail, not Mailman, to
process the messages, and you wouldn't just do "sendmail -t < FILE".
If it's Sendmail's normal queue, Sendmail has a command to retry
(maybe "flush") the queue (although that should happen automatically).
If it's some sort of last resort configuration to ensure delivery of
the message SOMEWHERE, ANYWHERE, I have no idea.