Debugging Mailman error messages


Mailman follows several rules when handling mail to be sent to a Mailman list. When a message is forwarded to the Owners and Moderators it is because one of the rules said to check with them first.

Moderation Messages arrive with five pieces of information included in them.

Below are the most common reasons messages are held for moderation:

Post by non-member to a members-only list

The list is set so only members can send to it, and this message was sent by a non-member.

This often catches owners, as being an owner doesn't give any privileges except editing the configuration of the list. For an owner to send mail to a member only list, they must either subscribe OR add themselves to the accept_these_nonmembers option on the Sender filters page. You can add non-owners to the accept_these_nonmembers to allow them to post without subscribing also.

Post to moderated list

The sender is moderated. This could mean that only this individual user is moderated or that all members of the list are.

To change moderation for just one user, find them on the Membership Management page and un-check the mod checkbox for them. Submit your changes to save the change.

To change moderation for all users, scroll down to the bottom and select Off under Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible and select Set to save.

Message body is too big: XXXX bytes with a limit of XX KB.

The sender is allowed to send mail, but they size of the mail is larger than the preset limit.

The default limit is 40k, which is a fairly large email and allows for small attachments. You can increase the limit by changing the value of max_message_size option on the General Options page.

However, email is not the best venue for sending large attachments (a list with 500 members, each receiving a 2MB file means 1GB of email). Rutgers recommends that this value is not changed as too many large attachments going out can seriously degrade Mailman service. Any list causing this kind of degradation may be temporarily shut down to preserve the Mailman service. In most cases, you would be better served hosting the attached file on a web page and point to that web page in an email.

Message has implicit destination

This means Mailman received this message but that the message did not have the List Name in either the To or Cc fields.

This most often occurs because the message is forwarded to the list from another person/list or because the mail is spam. Spammers often obscure the list of recipients when they send mail. If you had one list subscribed to another, the mail sent to the parent list would be flagged with this reason. To avoid this, you can go to the Recipient filters and add the parent list name to acceptable_aliases option. Submit your changes to save the change.

Too many recipients

This is mostly a spam interference option. Spammers often send mail with large amounts of recipients listed in the To or Cc fields. This defaults to a limit of 10 recipients. If you find that you are often sending to more than 10 mailing addresses at once, you may want to consider requesting an additional Mailman list.