Common problems FAQ

Problem: All Mailman web pages give a 404 File not found error.
Solution: Your web server has not been set up properly for handling Mailman's cgi commands. Make sure you've:

Configured the web server to give permissions to $prefix/cgi-bin
Restarted the web server properly.

Consult your web server's documentation for instructions on how to do these things.

Problem: All Mailman web pages give an Internal Server Error.
Solution: The likely problem is that you are using the wrong GID or UID for CGI scripts. Check your syslog. If you see, for example, a line like:

Attempt to exec script with invalid gid 51, expected 99

You need to reinstall Mailman, and specify $CGI_GID to be 51, as described in the installation instructions.

Problem: I send mail to the list, and get back mail saying the list is not found!
Solution: You probably didn't add the necessary aliases to the system alias database, given to you when you ran the newlist command. If you did add them, you likely did not update the alias database, or your system requires you to run newaliases explicitly. Refer to section 5 above for more information.

Problem: I send mail to the list, and get back mail saying, unknown mailer error.
Solution: The likely problem is that you are using the wrong GID or UID for mail. Check your syslog. If you see, for example, a line like:

Attempt to exec script with invalid gid 51, expected 99

You need to reinstall Mailman, and specify $MAIL_GID to be 51, as described in the installation instructions. see notes on Postfix below, as by default it will create these problems on installation.

Problem: I use Postfix for my MTA and the mail wrapper programs are logging complaints about the wrong GID.
Solution: Create a separate aliases file for Postfix in its main.cf config file under the variable alias_maps. Put the file somewhere in Mailman's home directory, or somewhere else where the user mailman has write access to it; as user mailman call Postfix's postalias on the alias file.

% postalias the-alias-file

Also as user mailman, run

% python -c'import os; print os.getgid()'

This should print out the group id that Mailman should be configured to expect when the mail wrapper programs are run. Call it thegid. Rebuild Mailman with

% ./configure --with-mail-gid=thegid

Problem: I send mail to the list, and get back mail saying, sh: wrapper not available for sendmail programs
Solution: Your system uses sendmail restricted shell (smrsh). You need to configure smrsh by creating a symbolic link from the mail wrapper ($prefix/mail/wrapper) to the directory identifying executables allowed to run under smrsh.

Some common names for this directory are /var/admin/sm.bin, /usr/admin/sm.bin or /etc/smrsh.

Note that on Debian Linux, the system makes /usr/lib/sm.bin, which is wrong, you will need to create the directory /usr/admin/sm.bin and add the link there. Note further that any aliases newaliases spits out will need to be adjusted to point to the secure link to the wrapper.

Problem: I messed up when I called configure. How do I clean things up and re-install?
Solution:

% make clean
% ./configure --with-the-right-options
% make install