Re: [Savannah-users] Mailing list discarding random messages

[Bob Proulx]

Marin Rameša wrote:
> I'm using a mailing list address@hidden for the group
> www-hr. The problem is that the mailing list is discarding random
> messages (I did not find a pattern explaining how this is done). I
> removed the size limit and tried all sorts of configuration
> combinations, but the group members still don't receive all of the
> messages, and not all messages are archived, just some of them.

There are a couple of posibilities.  First the mx receiving machine
"eggs" has some anti-spam features.  (I am not sure exactly what.)  If
the message is rejected there then it will not enter the Mailman
system.

Since that is a non-english list then listhelper is not suitable for
use with it.  Currently listhelper is only suitable for English
language lists.  Non-english is too likely to be misclassified as spam
and discarded if attached to the listhelper system.

Second is a question.  Are the posters subscribed to the mailing list?
Or their address added to the whitelist?  Posters who are subscribed
or have the address added to the whitelist will have no screening of
any kind (other than that on the eggs incoming mx receiving machine).

You are listed as the owner for the www-hr-lista mailing list.  Are
you receiving the moderator messages for those missing emails?  If the
answer is no then the messages never arrived at the mailing list.  If
the answer is yes then the message arrived but was subsequently
discarded.

If you tell me the message-id of a message that was discarded I can
find it in the logs on lists.gnu.org and determine something about the
reason for the deletion, depending upon what is logged there.

Question: What is the significance of "lista" in the name?  We
currently try to avoid lists that meet either of these two patterns
since those are non-english lists and the anti-spam of listhelper
isn't suitable.

  www-..-(general|trans|discuss|internal)
  www-..-..-(general|trans|discuss|internal)

Is "lista" a pattern that should be added to that collection?  Or is
that a single one-off name unique to that list?

(I wish there were some uniformity in the list namings but so many of
them are uniquely named.  There are over 800 mailing lists with active
messages handled through listhelper at this time.  It is hard when
they are all unique.)

Ineiev wrote:
> Marin Rameša wrote:
> >I also have a mail that is for <multiple recipients> (including www-hr-
> >address@hidden) that did not get archived.
> 
> Just a guess: did you try to remove address@hidden from
> [General Options] -> [The list moderator email addresses]?

I see www-hr-lista in the tracking log.  So at least until recently it
was connected to listhelper and that could have been misclassifying
non-english messages.  So I assume it was connected to listhelper and
that you have just removed it.  That is a good action.

Jan Owoc wrote:
> I don't have solid proof, but I suspect something similar is
> happening to the www-pl-trans list. Someone claimed they sent an
> email to the list, but it doesn't appear in the moderation queue, as
> if it were discarded somewhere before.

I do not see www-pl-trans in tracking logs.  Furthermore it would have
been filtered from listhelper processing by the above removal
patterns.  I don't know if www-pl-trans is seeing the same problem as
www-hr-lista or not but it definitely isn't listhelper in this case.

And the same thing on debugging applies here.  If you receive a
moderator message as the list owner then it arrived into Mailman.  If
you did not then it didn't arrive at Mailman either.  If it did arrive
and you received moderator message and it disappeared then to
investigate I would need the message-id of the message and an
approximate time that the message came through so that I can find it
in the logs.

Also note that subscribed and whitelisted addresses have no filtering
upon them.  If the person is subscribed or whitelisted then their
message should be delivered.  The listhelper anti-spam can only be
applied to non-subscribers and non-whitelisted addresses.

And note that very large messages have various places where
restrictions take place.  I don't have a complete list but very large
messages will be rejected at smtp time.  Quite large messages that
make it through smtp to eggs will be held by Mailman.  Especially for
lists with a large number of subscribers the multiplier on bandwidth
can be extreme.  Please help to reduce the total bandwidth needed.
Compress attachments and so forth.  But if someone is sending very
large email messages then it is possible they will be rejected for
being too large.

Bob