[server-admins] Mailman bounce handling and apparently unreliable mail delivery

[Jonathan Marsden]

DM Smith wrote:

> I get these too. The frustrating thing is that I don't think that
> admins should be subject to the same policy.

Well, IMO the more fundamental frustrating thing is that email to list
admins really should be reliable in the first place :)  I doubt you
truly have horribly unreliable email service.  Mailman on crosswire.org
just *thinks* you do.  Why it thinks that is what needs investigating in
order to deal with this.

The second, related frustrating thing is ... that I can't analyze
crosswire.org mail logs to see the details of *why* mail to you guys is
not perceived by Mailman as reliable, because I can't read the log files
/var/log/mail* :)

At this point, based on a quick look at /var/log/mailman/* my strong
suspicion is that the mail system on crosswire.org is somehow
misconfigured in a way that often breaks (bounces or delays) email to
some or all of its local @crosswire.org email accounts, including
scribe at crosswire.org.  This is happening several times a day, based on
the contents of /var/log/mailman/bounce.

Based on the contents of /var/log/mailman/smtp-failure the recurring
theme is a frequent failure to verify the sender address
mailman-bounces at www.crosswire.org.  While there are fairly obvious
configuration hacks we could do to bypass this sender verification, the
real issue of why that is happening is unclear to me, and will probably
not become clear until I can read the /var/log/maillog-* files (although
I might find more info if I have time to look in more detail at the rest
of the mailman logs).

BTW, if whoever set up exim and mailman on crosswirelorg documented
their installation and configuration I'd be very interested in reading
that documentation.  If it does nto exist then... well, IMO it *should*
exist :)

Jonathan