[Server-admins] Mailman and exim configuration

[Jonathan Marsden]

Troy A. Griffitts wrote:

> o    mailman does not send admins admin notices

There may be an odd lack-of-whitespace issue in the mailman_router
configration section of /etc/exim/exim.conf .  Several continuation
lines that I would expect to start with whitespace do not do so.
Compare the example at

  http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/node21.html

with lines 675-777 of /etc/exim/exim.conf to see what I mean.  I don't
*know* that is the cause, but it seems worth trying.  Adding whitespace
and restarting exim is trivial for someone with admin privs.

I could probably look into the mailman/exim stuff further if I could:

  (a) read the logs under /var/log, especially /var/log/maillog* and the
contents of the /var/log/exim directory

  (b) edit /etc/exim/exim.conf (if you trust me that much)
  (c) restart exim (also if you trust me that much!)

> o    to get this new list to actually work, I had to find and fix this
> error in /var/log/exim/main.log
> 
> 2009-07-25 17:14:52 H=localhost.extremezone.com (www.crosswire.org)
> [127.0.0.1] sender verify fail for
> <server-admins-bounces at www.crosswire.org>: Unknown user
> 2009-07-25 17:14:52 H=localhost.extremezone.com (www.crosswire.org)
> [127.0.0.1] F=<server-admins-bounces at www.crosswire.org> rejected RCPT
> <jmarsden at fastmail.fm>: Sender verify failed
> 
> by adding an entry in /etc/aliases
> server-admins-bounces: scribe
> 
> Though there are not other aliases like this for any other list.

Looks like fastmail.fm is doing some sender verification that either the
default mailman exim setup does not handle, or else the whitespace /
lack of -bounces email aliasing issue leads to this failure as well.

BTW, what is "localhost.extremezone.com" doing here?  I would guess that
extremezone.com is the colo hosting provider where the CrossWire server
is.  But even so, how did that "localhost.extremezone.com" FQDN get into
this error message?  Is there some level of virtual hosting going on
here, or an "email firewall" between the crosswire.org server and the
Internet?

> <scribe at crosswire.org>: 451 Timeout trying verify RCPT
> (scribe at crosswire.org) for domain (crosswire.org)

While that isn't great, the error response is transient (per RFC 2821,
4xx series codes basically mean "oops, please try again later") so the
sending SMTP server *should* have retried their message to you later
(and hopefully it would have got through that next time).

> I'm not sure if the smtp issues have anything to do with the mailman
> issues, but I suppose they might.

Or maybe the 87% IO wait is more of an issue, and is causing other
things (like the mail server) to time out sometimes???

It's hard to speculate with any real accuracy.  Do these kinds of email
errors happen at predictable times, or all the time, or randomly?  Is
there any kind of pattern to them you are aware of?

Jonathan