[guide_mailman-3] qmail-lmtp: mail bounces when mailman is refusing connections

[moritzboth]

The qmail-lmtp script will return hard errors (error code 100) on any error except for smtp soft fail. This also happens when mailman is not running or refuses connections. As it happens, mailman3 occasional refuses connections on the lmtp service port although it is running. I don't know why, I am still debugging.

Anyway, mail should never bounce just because a service is not running.

I replaced the exit code in the last line of the script with 111 to only ever generate soft failures for the time being.

Maybe it would be worth mentioning this in the guide.

Thanks for reading,
Moritz

[noave]

Mh I guess you mean the qmail-lmtp script that is downloaded from https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/raw/master/contrib/qmail-lmtp regarding the guide. Interesting, but maybe this should be better discussed with the dev community at the repo for the file: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues

[moritzboth]

this should be better discussed with the dev community at the repo for the file: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues

Hi noave, thank you for the pointer. I thought it would be of interest for the uberspace guide, too, so no user mail bounces in a confusing way and with no error message about the cause. Mail services should retry on temporary failure. In my experience, mailing list end users tend to be easily confused and to rapidly loose trust in list services.

Regards,
Moritz

[edit] PS: I filed a bug at mailman's gitlab, too.