Hey folks, I've been running a FreeBSD / Postfix / Mailman list server for some 7 or 8 years now. The last time I updated FreeBSD was about 3 years ago so it is only at 6.0. That was also the last time I updated Postfix and Mailman until this recent spat of problems which prompted me to upgrade both to the latest stable versions (as of yesterday). So 2.1.13 in the case of Mailman.
Things have been running fine on this server for years with nary an issue. I have not made any changes recently, so it was quite troublesome when this problem started a few days ago. My lists started experiencing 10 and 12 hour delays between mail coming in, and going back out again. If I look at message headers I can see Postfix gets the message, then hands off to mailman, then it sits there for hours on end, and finally gets sent out. I should mention that this is a pretty lightly loaded system. The lists are basically personal hobby lists - the busiest of which gets maybe 100 to 200 emails a day. It is also a web server but traffic is pretty light. Load average is usually under 1. I spent a good 12 to 14 hours yesterday looking into this - went through some of the archives for this list, as well as the FAQ wiki. Found a few similar problems but nothing just the same. I look in the Mailman logs dir. Nothing really onerous that I see. I look in smtp and see what looks like normal processing. e.g. one of my lists looks like it had a number of messages just a few minutes ago, but I have not seen them yet where normally I would expect to see them almost instantly. Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <3f1854170912301503l375e2259k439e633f55b8b...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.055 seconds Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <3f1854170912301511m39e7eb9djc157df16d753b...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.041 seconds Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <6e40ba2b0912301514j5bbd84b5maef5a93e4c46...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.053 seconds Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <54a6f3cb0912301520r2dd77b03i5ebd8492b4af5...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.040 seconds Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <b9ff8c7d0912301529r1411fbdtb1860e06ef539...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.050 seconds Jan 04 12:08:18 2010 (85805) <8d0a26d70912301627o1571ababscf8396703e9bb...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to brewers for 3 recips, completed in 0.052 seconds smtp-failure seems to contain not much else other than reports of bogus email addresses. I've used this as an opportunity to weed out most of them, but there are still messages that had been queued up for them so I'm not sure how long it will take those to fail delivery. For example if I "tail -10000" (ten thousand) that file and grep out the 5 main bogus email addresses, I get one single line : Jan 04 12:07:50 2010 (50034) Low level smtp error: (4, 'Interrupted system call'), msgid: <b100e8e71001021626l470dc99fmcea7aceba0728...@mail.gmail.com> But i have been unable to find out what this means. But given that I only see it once I am not too worried about it really. Can someone tell me where to look as to why stuff is getting backed up in the outgoing queue? -- “Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV” - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food" ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org