Slow and out-of-sequence delivery
Dear Mailman Supporters,
I participate in a professional forum run on Mailman. It serves a small nonprofit mutual benefit organization with possibly fewer than 50 members.
Messages that I post to the forum have been taking as long as 48 hours to come back to me. The issue is not new and AFAIK no one has been messing with the settings. But the issue seems to have been becoming more and more severe in recent weeks.
Perhaps because of such delays, I also sometimes see responses to other posts before I see the original post. It takes extra time to understand the context when that happens. People's time gets wasted answering questions that have already been answered without their knowledge. It's just frustrating all around.
The email address from which messages are sent is not in the list of email addresses maintained in the hosting account cPanel. There seems to be one by the name "relay" that is being used by Mailman.
I actually don't know which version of Mailman is installed. I'm hoping it's the more recent of the two options so I optimistically joined this particular list.
The hosting service tech support can't help because they can't see the forum email address or its logs. At least that's what they say.
Tech-support also tells me that they routinely do load-balancing and the server should not be excessively busy.
It should certainly not take 48 hours to send an email message to 50 recipients. It shouldn't even take more than an hour, because the system is set to send messages at least once per hour -- maybe even every 10 minutes -- and the whole queue should be able to be handled in one sending cycle ... right?
A contract tech support guy has suggested that it might solve a problem if we started spending $100-$150 per month on a dedicated server. I think that is a wrongheaded suggestion. If the organization had thousands of members, it would make more sense. But throwing money at the problem if something is simply not set up right, or some critical file is corrupted, is not the right solution. Set the broken bone correctly first, THEN inject stimulants and send the player back out onto the field. :-)
Thanks in advance for any help!
Gregg Roberts http://legalsupport-sc.com Legal Support Services of Southern California 43430 E. Florida Ave #F-293 Hemet CA 92544 951-330-4450
The information contained in this e-mail message is privileged and confidential information, intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution of copy of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by telephone at 951-330-4450 or reply by e-mail and delete or discard this message.
On 12/16/22 13:18, Gregg Roberts wrote:
Messages that I post to the forum have been taking as long as 48 hours to come back to me. The issue is not new and AFAIK no one has been messing with the settings. But the issue seems to have been becoming more and more severe in recent weeks.
This is a symptom of a backlogged out queue in Mailman.
Perhaps because of such delays, I also sometimes see responses to other posts before I see the original post. It takes extra time to understand the context when that happens. People's time gets wasted answering questions that have already been answered without their knowledge. It's just frustrating all around.
The email address from which messages are sent is not in the list of email addresses maintained in the hosting account cPanel. There seems to be one by the name "relay" that is being used by Mailman.
I actually don't know which version of Mailman is installed. I'm hoping it's the more recent of the two options so I optimistically joined this particular list.
The Mailman provided with cPanel is Mailman 2.1, not Mailman 3.
The hosting service tech support can't help because they can't see the forum email address or its logs. At least that's what they say.
The hosting service only offers Mailman because it is part of cPanel. Unfortunately this is true of many cPanel based hosting services. They offer Mailman but are incompetent to support it.
Your issue is a symptom of a backlogged out queue and it probably has nothing to do with your list. There will be only one Mailman instance on the cPanel host machine and it will be delivering messages for all the lists on all the virtual hosts supported by that machine.
There are threads in the archives on the backlogged out queue issue, e.g. <https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/thread/QGVWWK6OJSND3LP6TF6MYBTQT7VQASGB/> and <https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/thread/EPNAIFZJ76C6U76XLPFGRF46UU5FVRHG/>. There is also a FAQ article at <https://wiki.list.org/x/17892002>.
A contract tech support guy has suggested that it might solve a problem if we started spending $100-$150 per month on a dedicated server. I think that is a wrongheaded suggestion. If the organization had thousands of members, it would make more sense. But throwing money at the problem if something is simply not set up right, or some critical file is corrupted, is not the right solution. Set the broken bone correctly first, THEN inject stimulants and send the player back out onto the field. :-)
A dedicated server might help, but probably only because it would remove you from the impact of Mailman lists from other vhosts on the shared server.
There are things the host can do to improve the situation, but only if they are competent in tuning Mailman and the outgoing MTA. If they are willing to work on this, they are welcome to post to mailman-users@python.org <https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.python.org/> and we will try to help, but you are at their mercy to fix this and your only recourse is to look for a different hosting service. If it's only for Mailman lists, see <https://wiki.list.org/COM/Mailman%20hosting%20services>.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Thank you so much, Mark!
I will look into this and see if I can get a dedicated instance of Mailman installed without the expense of a full dedicated server.
Gregg Roberts http://legalsupport-sc.com Legal Support Services of Southern California 43430 E. Florida Ave #F-293 Hemet CA 92544 951-330-4450
The information contained in this e-mail message is privileged and confidential information, intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this message is not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution of copy of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by telephone at 951-330-4450 or reply by e-mail and delete or discard this message.
participants (2)
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Gregg Roberts -
Mark Sapiro