list down!

It's funny when something goes wrong with the mailing list. The first thing people tend to do is e-mail a test message to the list. Of course, that's useless when the list is down and, at worst, spamming when the list is up. The better thing to do is to contact the list owner offlist.

It's likely that the list owner already knows that it is down and is working the problem. How? In most usual cases, the list owner gets a bunch of spam or mailer-daemon errors throughout the day. When those dry up, there's obviously something wrong.

One thing that you should do first though is to check the archives. If the last message there doesn't match the last message you received, then the list is up but you haven't received the message yet. This could be a misconfiguration on your side or a slow mail server. Check your configuration or your filters first.

That said, the problem that we had with the lists today and last night appears to have been a mailman problem. spamd was also dead on the server when I looked and mailman was throwing some errors about not being able to connect. I restarted spamd and restarted mailman's qrunner processes. There were over 3000 pieces of mail queued up by mailman though and going through them was incredibly slow. So I commented out the SpamAssassin handler in mm_cfg.py to remove it from the pipeline and restarted qrunner. On top of that, I went through and manually removed a bunch of obvious spam from the queue. mailman finally caught up and we should be back to normal operation.