For some unknown reason, I got everything working a while ago (last week
sometime) and things were flowing normally for regular mail. Then, (who
knows why) the provider we're currently using removed the ability to send
smtp mail direct to it's target destination. This took some time to
figure out, and needless to say, we're not very happy about that,
especially since no notification was given of this impending change.
After we figured that out, it was a simple matter to force our outgoing
mail through their server, and this actually worked for a time. But then
for some reason I have yet to figure out, listserv ran into a snag, and
refused to process any additional emails. All the emails that it received
just got queued up in it's spool and went nowhere. Well, after examing
logs, and attempting to switch mail transfer agents multiple times, we
finally traced it to a single file in the spool directory that had some
illegal characters in the header. Why this happened we do not know, and
frankly it doesn't matter. We removed the offending file from the spool
directory, and presto, listserv then went on a rampage processing all
6700+ files in it's spool directory. Sorry for the sudden rush of emails,
there's no way to tell listserv to process only a few messages at a time
<grumble>
Anyway, it appears to be fixed now, and our install of qmail instead of
sendmail appears to be operating normally as well.
This is a good thing, and also means that with the addition of qmail, we
are no longer limited to just 10 lists of 500 subscribers each as the free
version of listserv gives us. We're going to implement all our lists onto
qmail ezmlm software which provides the same functionality as listserv,
and has no restrictions on use/distribution. These changes won't take
place for a while, but hopefully they are on the table for being
implemented within a few months. The change should be transparent to
everyone on the mailing lists, except that perhaps messages will be
processed faster. For the admins though, it means no more wading through
hundreds of bounce messages trying to find the bad email addresses, as
qmail will weed these out for us automatically (whew)
I thank everyone for their patentence, and also to those who setup the
life raft while our system troubles got ironed out.
This whole thing started because of someone hacking the machine, and
screwing up many things. Sendmail being one of those things.
Hopefully we've fixed everything that got broken, and can simply go
forward from here.
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