[CLUE-Admin] slooow email delivery

[CLUE President]

So, I'm not sure where exactly the problem(s) are with the slow delivery.

1)  The 'qrunner' cron job delivers queued email to the sendmail MTA.  It runs 
every minute and according to the ~mailman/logs/qrunner file, seems to fail 
frequently.  When it does it leaves stale lock files in ~mailman/locks/ 
directory.  The next time qrunner runs, the stale lock file prevents a new 
instance from starting up.  This prevents mail from getting to MTA.

2)  The sendmail queue seems pretty large -- there are 46 messages in it.  
Note that list emails are send to the group, as a single email.  Checking the 
mailman post log, there should only be a few (<5 messages).

So, what's with all of the other queued emails?

I think one problem is that mailman send a reply to every post by a 
non-subscriber.  So, the 30-40 spam emails we receive daily are going to 
receive an automatic email reply saying 'you can't post' from mailman.  Since 
these are spammer domains, I think sendmail is trying to send over-and-over 
again until it figures out that the user and/or domains are bogus or relaying 
is denied -- mostly it seems to be a connection refused message, according to 
mailq output.

So, to combat #2 (which perhaps is causing #1), I turned off the following 
mailman option for the talk, tech, admin, and announce lists (these all 
receive the most spam).  This option is under 'General Options':

'Send mail to poster when their posting is held for approval?'
(default is 'Y' -- I set to 'N' for talk, tech, admin, announce)

Let's watch email response for a few days and see if this is the cause of the 
problem.  If not, we can continue to explore and perhaps turn on the 
notification feature again.

Jeff
-- 
Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts (CLUE)
http://cluedenver.org/
Jeffery Cann, President