Nabble and mailman gnu.org: posting issue

[Xavier Scheuer]

Hi!

I'm administrating a mailing list and we are using Nabble mainly as
Archives.  But we have also members that post their message using
Nabble.
The mailing list is managed using Mailman version 2.1.13
(gnu.org mailing list).

The correct behaviour is the following:

  – if a subscriber of the mailing list (i.e. whose e-mail address
    is in our mailman subscribers database) send a message through
    Nabble, the message is also automatically sent to mail subscribers
    via mailman;
  – if somebody send a message via Nabble but is not a mailman
    subscriber, then we (mailman administrators) receive an approval
    request to send it through mailman too and the message is marked as
    "Pending" on Nabble in the meanwhile.

The problem is that we have some mailman subscribers who try to send
messages via Nabble but their message is not sent via mailman in the
same way.  Their message is marked as "Pending" but we do not receive
approval request to send it through mailman too.
So their messages posted via Nabble are only visible on Nabble.

Could you help us finding why it does not work for these users?

Here are some (useful) informations:

Mailing list: [e-mail]
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user-fr/
Nabble address: http://lilypond-french-users.1298960.n2.nabble.com/
Example of user that can't send message through Nabble (but is a
mailman subscriber and can send messages directly via mail to mailman):
http://lilypond-french-users.1298960.n2.nabble.com/user/UserNodes.jtp?user=383529&node=1298960

I must add that this user tried to unsubscribe and subscribe again to
both mailman and Nabble, that we added him as a Nabble group member
http://lilypond-french-users.1298960.n2.nabble.com/catalog/Members.jtp?app=1298960
without success.

We do not know if the problem is due to Nabble, gnu.org or something
else.  Help would be very appreciated.

And finally here is a copy of one error message he got when trying to
send via Nabble:

Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender‏
De :    Mail Delivery System ([e-mail])
Envoyé :        sam. 08/05/10 17:15
À :     [e-mail]
This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of its
recipients. This is a permanent error. The following address(es) failed:

[e-mail]
SMTP error from remote mail server after end of data:
host eggs.gnu.org [140.186.70.92]: 550 Administrative prohibition

------ This is a copy of the message, including all the headers. ------

Return-path: <[e-mail]>
Received: from jim.nabble.com ([192.168.236.80])
by kuber.nabble.com with esmtp (Exim 4.63)
(envelope-from <[e-mail]>)
id 1OAlkV-0002BV-Cr
for [e-mail]; Sat, 08 May 2010 08:15:27 -0700
Date: Sat, 8 May 2010 08:15:27 -0700 (PDT)
From: Fallout <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail]
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Subject: test
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-SA-Exim-Connect-IP: 192.168.236.80
X-SA-Exim-Mail-From: [e-mail]
X-SA-Exim-Scanned: No (on kuber.nabble.com); SAEximRunCond expanded to false
"

Thanks in advance,
Xavier

[Hugo <Nabble>]

It seems to me that gnu.org has some kind of restriction that doesn't let any SMTP server send emails to it. It probably checks if the sender of the outgoing email belongs to the same domain as the SMTP server. For example, [e-mail] could only be sent by a computer in the domain.com domain. This is just a guess based on the error message you posted. It would be great if you could contact gnu.org and check this issue. If this is true, maybe they could add Nabble as an exception to this rule?

[Xavier Scheuer]

Thank you for this quick answer.

[Sorry, I'm ignorant in all that "mail server" stuffs]
Please let me know if I have understood well:

  you think that gnu.org "incoming" server check that the SMTP server
  it receives the message from (the Nabble one) is the same as the domain
  name of the sender (let's call it [e-mail], so "hotmail.com");
  and if they are different (which is always the case if somebody send
  via Nabble), the gnu.org "filter" it and simply block it, so it is
  not even treated by gnu.org.  Am I right?

But the thing I cannot understand is that this only affect a few users.
The large majority can send through Nabble and their messages are
accepted by gnu.org without problem.

[Xavier Scheuer]

I have thought again.

If I remember correctly the 2 e-mail addresses that have this problem
were in [e-mail] .  Maybe gnu.org's filtering is more precise
and do what you said only for sender mail addresses in "hotmail.com"
domain name.  Which could explain why other e-mail addresses
(in gmail.com or other domain names) are not affected.  What do you
think?

Anyway, you think that this problem does not come from Nabble, right?

I'll do some tests, speak again with these users and see what we can do
about gnu.org with the others administrators of the mailing list.
Thanks a lot for your attention.

Cheers,
Xavier

[Hugo <Nabble>]

Hi Xavier, you understood the problem correctly. If this only happens with hotmail users, then this should be easy to test. Please let me know if you need my help.