On 6/24/23 9:54 PM, Ken Alker wrote:
I am working on a mail server that was migrated from mailman V2 to mailman V3 in February. I just noticed that there are over 1000 messages in the bad queue. All of the messages in the bad queue are dated 2/2/23 and all have a timestamp within a one-hour window of each other.
I used mailman qfile to inspect five random emails in the bad queue and so far they are all "successfully subscribed" emails,
This is a bit strange. See below.
but I presume there are no guarantees there aren't others mixed in there that might be legitimate emails (ie. I just unshunted 140 emails in the shunt queue and they were all good emails and all got processed).
Presumably these were shunted due to some issue that was subsequently fixed.
I figure that the easiest way to inspect these 1000 emails is just to have them re-delivered. I tried moving one from the bad queue to the shunt queue and I ran "mailman unshunt" but nothing happened.
What does nothing happened mean? "mailman unshunt" should move the message to the original queue which was stored in the 'whichq' attribute in the msgdata when the message was shunted. Since this wasn't a shunted message, there's no 'whichq' attribute so it goes to the 'in' queue. I.e., "mailman unshunt" would have moved the message from the 'shunt' queue to the 'in' queue. If the message wound up back in the shunt queue, there should be messages in mailman.log indicating why.
Is there a way to reprocess the bad queue?
You could just move the messages to the 'in' queue.
Also, what exactly is the bad queue?
If Mailman's content filtering is enabled and Filter Action is Preserve, messages which have no remaining content after content filtering are put in the 'bad' queue. These are the only messages put there. When this happens there should a log message like
<message-id> preserved in file base <queue_file>
It is unclear to me how these 1000+ messages wound up in the 'bad' queue. If you have logs from Feb 2, they might help. My guess is there was some MTA misrouting that caused these list welcome messages (from some mass subscribe?) to be rerouted to the list posting address combined with some bad content filtering settings that removed all the content, but that seems pretty far fetched.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan