Cryptic Mailman rejection messages

Why are my messages to a Mailman list server rejected?

Article:207
Created:2003-04-29 14:13:47
Categories:
  E-mail
  Mailing Lists
  Mailman

Question or Symptom

I get a number of cryptic messages back from the Mailman list server when I try to post to a list. What's the deal? Can you explain them?

Resolution

Sure. Mailman like most list servers makes sense to postmasters and not too much to anyone else. Here are several common issues that come up when posting.

1. too many recipients
  "Please trim the recipient list; it is too long."
  This means you had more than 10 people listed in the To: field. Why is this
  bad? It most often is used by spammers to send large amounts of junk mail 
  with relative ease. The MM folks recommend just sending a message to the 
  mailing list alone then if you wanted to send it to several other people,
  send a copy to your list of people.
 
2. post held for approval, moderated list
  This means the list you've sent a message to is moderated. A human looks at
  each message and decides whether it's appropriate for the list or not. Your
  message won't go out to the list until the moderator has reviewed it.
 
3. post is rejected, not member of list
  This means the mailing address you've posted from is not recognized as 
  being a member of this "members only" mailing list. It's possible you've
  put an alternative address in your email client's setup or that you've
  sent mail from a machine that created an odd email address for you. For
  example, if you're subscribed as "tori@swcp.com" and you send some email
  from one of our Unix machines, if might create a from address of:
     tori@llama.swcp.com
   These two addresses won't match and your post will be rejected.
 
4. Message has implicit destination
  "Blind carbon copies or other implicit destinations are not allowed.  Try
  reposting your message by explicitly including the list address in 
  the To: or Cc: fields."
 
   Blind carbon copy or BCC: is used to send to someone without that email
  address appearing in any of the headers. It's used sometimes to let a third
  party in on a conversation without one of the members knowing that. It is
  widely abused by spammers to send you email you don't want. This is why
  Mailman prohibits messages with BCCs. The simple fix is send the message
  to the list in the To field. Don't add additional people in the BCC. Just
  send them a copy of the message.