This was my bad. For about 20 years now, I myself never used mail commands except subscribe and my Mailman 3 users have *always* used the web interface. And as you might guess, the exim4 config was developed by tweaking a Mailman 2 config until it worked for me.

Thank you for diagnosing and documenting a more configuration, Abhilash!

Steve

Abhilash Raj writes:

Hi Mark,

Excerpts from Mark Lindsay's message of April 20, 2017 5:37 pm:

<snip>

Here are some baffling lines from /var/log/exim4/mainlog from the incoming

...

potato-leave@lists.mydomain.org email:

2017-04-21 00:25:03 1d1MNj-0007OQ-5r DKIM: d=nervous-org.20150623. gappssmtp.com s=20150623 c=relaxed/relaxed a=rsa-sha256 [verification succeeded] 2017-04-21 00:25:03 1d1MNj-0007OQ-5r <= redacted@nervous.org H= mail-qk0-f170.google.com [209.85.220.170] P=esmtp S=2466 id= CABPy5zyQtJHXtCgrN37GHCUOjuo3J=DO_j0ZD03zm8gk+4shww@mail.gmail.com 2017-04-21 00:25:03 1d1MNj-0007OQ-5r => potato@lists.mydomain.org < potato-leave@lists.mydomain.org> R=mailman3_router T=mailman3_transport H=localhost [127.0.0.1] C="250 Ok" 2017-04-21 00:25:03 1d1MNj-0007OQ-5r Completed

Why does it say `potato@lists.mydomain.org <potato-leave@lists.mydomain.o rg

...

`?

I think this is actually an exim4 problem, so if the solution is to just switch to postfix, then I will definitely do that. But I'm just asking in case someone had a similar issue with exim4 and was able to work through it.

Yes, I had the exact same problem very recently and was able to fix it. The updated documentation1 should fix your problem. The basic gist of the problem is that the exim configuration on the older documentation is missing a critical part.

Exim4 by default strips off any prefixes/suffixes when delivering mail to the mailman, which causes mailman to post all the messages to mailing list instead of processing them as commands.

rcpt_include_affixes = true

Adding the above line to the transport fixes that problem.

a.html#exim4-configuration

thanks, Abhilash