Ibiam Chihurumnaya via Mailman-users writes:
I finished installing mailman3, setup lmtp and smtp for mail delivery and I followed the instructions on the mailman 3 installation page.
First, make sure that all the mail services are listening on the same protocol for localhost (IPv4 or IPv6), as Mark says in his reply.
Is this a separate host (hardware, VM, or container) that handles ONLY mailman lists? Or do you want this host to handle other incoming mail as well? If it's dedicated to Mailman, you don't need Dovecot, and it complicates the system by quite a bit. Removing it from the system will simply configuration considerably. If the host is handling other incoming mail, then Dovecot is a good system for providing IMAP (and I seem to recall POP3 as well) for user mailboxes and well worth the complexity.
I've folded log messages below for readability.
Jan 31 12:53:54 lists postfix/lmtp[4128841]: 348981A8A2A: to=<mailman@lists.sugarlabs.org>, orig_to=<mailman>, relay=none, delay=113, delays=0.04/52/61/0, dsn=4.4.1, status=deferred (connect to localhost[::1]:24: Connection refused)
The log entry above says that you are sending Mailman (list) mail to port 24, the port used in Dovecot's documentation for 'inet' LMTP services. This may be in contention with Dovecot, unless you are trying to pass Mailman traffic through Dovecot. If Dovecot is listening on an 'inet' socket, what port is Dovecot listening on? What port is Mailman listening on?
I recommend that you NOT have Mailman pass through Dovecot, because it will be confusing to anyone familiar with Mailman operations trying to help you. Normally, Mailman listens on 8024, which is routed directly by the MTA (Postfix, in your case).
Jan 31 12:54:53 lists dovecot: lmtp(mailman@lists.sugarlabs.org)<4131586><qMl1NuFrfmkCCz8AOj1W/w>: Error: auth-master: userdb lookup(mailman@lists.sugarlabs.org): Disconnected unexpectedly
The log entry above says that Dovecot is trying to handle Mailman traffic, but something went wrong with the userdb lookup. I can't help you with that.
Jan 31 12:55:18 lists postfix/smtpd[4132212]: fatal: open dictionary: expecting "type:name" form instead of "dovecot"
I setup lmtp with dovecot, and I have this in dovecot.conf;
If you are referring to the log message above, that is from Postfix, and it appears that one of Postfix's tables is configure as "dovecot" rather than a proper Postfix database.
passdb passwd-file { driver = passwd-file }
I also have these set in postfix main.cf;
lmtp_sender_dependent_authentication = yes lmtp_sasl_auth_enable = yes lmtp_sasl_password_maps = hash:path_to_passwd_file
I assume that "path_to_password_file" is a placeholder for the password file, which is typically /etc/postfix/sasl/sasl_passwd.db, compiled from the source in /etc/postfix/sasl/sasl_passwd using postmap.
I'm wondering if I need to disable sasl because I set dovecot not to use ssl because lmtp is only running internally.
SASL authentication is independent in the SMTP protocol with a separate keyword "AUTH", so disabling SSL is irrelevant unless Postfix always uses TLS (a very unusual configuration for a Mailman site). However, as long as LMTP is running only internally, I believe authentication is not very useful since any attacker who can access internal communications likely can read the password file and authenticate.
Too many things can go wrong. I recommend that you disable all the authentication until you have all mail flows working without authentication, then add authentication as you require for your applications.
Steve
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan