Savannah mail system

See also ListServer and MailingListsInternals.

The principal GNU (and FSF?) email server is lists.gnu.org, managed by FSF sysadmins. Savannah people and programs do not have root access.

For outgoing mail from Savannah, the internal host is used; see below.

Mailman

On lists.gnu.org, the usual per-list static Mailman aliases do not exist; instead, it looks at /var/lib/mailman/lists/listname/domains/ and checks for files that represent the domain of the list, such as gnu.org, nongnu.org, and the like.

Then, I don't really know:

there is some Exim code to take those files into account
currently (?), there is a replication script that copies all the list+domains information to mp.gnu.org - to it's probably checked there. jag said "it runs on the 42 of every hour". We can also run it through ~/mailman-export.

Mailing-List interface to Savannah frontend

See MailingListsInternals.

Valid sender

lists.gnu.org makes (used to make?) a series of checks that will reject mail from, say, kickino@savannah.gnu.org because this is apparently not a valid email. Email validation eventually falls back against fencepost (Unix users and the shares /com/mailer/aliases).

To bypass those checks, we added aliases at fencepost for Savannah users that need to send mail (gatekpr, libcrsync, Savane INVALID.NOREPLY, etc.). See also ListServer.

Antispam

If listhelper@gnu.org is listed as a moderator for a Mailman list, it wil use a conservatively-configured spamassassin to automatically (though asynchronously) remove spam. Details at ListHelperAntiSpam.

How mails are sent from within Savannah

A Savane cron job creates alias tables: /etc/aliases and /etc/email-addresses. This is used to map Unix user accounts to outgoing email, based on the email field in Savannah accounts. Alias tables are only updated on internal.

(clearly stale info as we don't own the dom0 any more, but leaving for what it may be worth) frontend, vcs-noshell _and_ the host/dom0: an exim4 system is configured (see infra/exim_forwarder.txt):

smarthost = 10.1.0.101

QUEUERUNNER='queueonly'

Debugging

Mail mostly happens from frontend. PHP there would send email. If you have a received message in hand, you can see the trail of servers in the Received: headers. It starts from PHP, goes to /usr/sbin/sendmail (postfix on those systems) and then out to eggs.gnu.org, then to lists.gnu.org and out to the mailing list for delivery.

If there is an error in sending, PHP and Apache combination should log an error to the frontend1:/var/log/apache2/error.log file.

All of the mail status should be logged to frontend1:/var/log/mail.*. When a message is sent, you should see the transaction logged there.

Logs are rotated. If you are looking back into the past you will need to look through the various dated log files to find the transaction, e.g.:

frontend0:/var/log# ls -lhog mail.*
-rw-r----- 1    0 May  8 06:25 mail.err
-rw-r----- 1 1.3K May  7 06:25 mail.err-20160507.gz
-rw-r----- 1 1.7K May  7 06:31 mail.err-20160508
-rw-r----- 1 600K Jul  6 23:26 mail.info
-rw-r----- 1 122K Jun 12 06:25 mail.info-20160612.gz
-rw-r----- 1 114K Jun 19 06:25 mail.info-20160619.gz
-rw-r----- 1 117K Jun 26 06:25 mail.info-20160626.gz
-rw-r----- 1 1.2M Jul  3 06:25 mail.info-20160703
-rw-r----- 1 600K Jul  6 23:26 mail.log
-rw-r----- 1 122K Jun 12 06:25 mail.log-20160612.gz
-rw-r----- 1 114K Jun 19 06:25 mail.log-20160619.gz
-rw-r----- 1 117K Jun 26 06:25 mail.log-20160626.gz
-rw-r----- 1 1.2M Jul  3 06:25 mail.log-20160703
-rw-r----- 1    0 Jun 21 06:25 mail.warn
-rw-r----- 1  211 May 22 05:46 mail.warn-20160522.gz
-rw-r----- 1  208 May 28 10:13 mail.warn-20160529.gz
-rw-r----- 1  119 Jun 12 00:48 mail.warn-20160612.gz
-rw-r----- 1  114 Jun 20 12:23 mail.warn-20160621

You can see messages pending for delivery in the mail queue with the mailq command on frontend.

NOTE: On May 7th 2016 the mail system was changed from exim4 to postfix (see http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers-public/2016-05/msg00007.html, http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/savannah-hackers-public/2016-06/msg00030.html).