[Mailman-Users] e-mails being kind of blackholed when sent to list or list-robot

[Mark Sapiro]

On 02/23/2016 12:53 PM, Fernando Gont wrote:
> On 02/20/2016 02:42 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>>
>> Yes, it is needed. It is the sender of various notices including monthly
>> password reminders an the recipient of bounces thereof. 
> 
> Why do yu actually need a *list* for sending such info?


You don't, but that's the way Mailman 2.x is designed so it is required.

>> It is also
>> exposed on the web admin and listinfo overview pages as a 'help' address
>> and depending on config may receive error notices from Mailman's cron
>> jobs. As such, it should have the Mailman admins as members and accept
>> non-member posts.
> 
> I guess that when you lists get created, the corresponding admins get
> added to such list?


No they don't. The people who are members of the site (mailman) list
should be site admins, not necessarily list admins. The membership of
this list is up to the site. No one is a member by default.


> Besides, it seems I'm receiving tons of spam messages on that this. Is
> post from not subscribers actually needed? What kind of info is sent to
> all list-admins?


You don't need to accept non-member posts. Mailman doesn't care if the
list has no members and all non-member posts are discarded, but there
are reasons to not do this.

Perhaps the most important is Mailman normally has a crontab which runs
several Mailman cron jobs. If you don't have a specific 'MAILTO='
setting in that crontab, and most people don't, any errors in those cron
jobs get sent to 'mailman' which is the 'mailman' list, and if you
discard those posts, you don't see them.

Further, the mailman at ... address is exposed on the default listinfo and
admin overview pages as an address to request help. It's not very
friendly to just discard those requests.

There are other ways to deal with this. First, Mailman is not a spam
filter. You should have good spam filtering in your MTA ahead of Mailman.

Also, if you don't want to accept non-member posts to the Mailman list,
you should at least consider setting an auto-responder to posts
explaining where to really go for help.

>>> More comments in-line...

>> In which case, you are using postfix_to_mailman.py delivery, but you
>> also have hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases in alias_maps in Postfix
>> and MTA='Postfix' uncommented in mm_cfg.py
> 
> I fixed the config as you suggested. Any clues what could possibly go
> wrong with the bad settings I had?


Probably nothing would go wrong, but MTA='Postfix' makes Mailman do
extra, unnecessary work to maintain data/aliases(.db) as lists are
created and removed, and having hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases in
Postfix alias_maps could confuse someone into thinking it's actually
being used for something and distract them from understanding that some
problem is really with postfix_to_mailman.py.

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