mail problem, using postfix & dovecot

[Chuck Robey]

Erik Cederstrand wrote:
> Chuck Robey wrote:
>> I have my mail system running on my FreeBSD server.  It uses postfix 
>> outgoing, and dovecot to manage the Imap server, and finally Seamonkey 
>> either locally or from one of my other machines, to read/write my 
>> mail, it makes for a very portable mail system, but I am now convinced 
>> I have one major bug.  It's that I'm getting too darn many duplicate 
>> mails.
>>
>> I didn't complain when that happened on all the FreeBSD posts, because 
>> we have so daarn many people crossposting, it'd be foolish to try to 
>> fix that.  BUT I just got dupes on some mail from Usenix, and I know 
>> Usenix isn't double posting me.
>>
>> Any  idea of any common sort of mail mistake I might have made?  Mail 
>> isn't my real forte, so I might well  have bungled something.  Any 
>> sort of hint, right or wrong, would help, and especially the wrong 
>> ones: I'll run them down anyhow, and during that running down, I often 
>> find the real error, so don't think I'll jump upon you for stupid 
>> suggestions.
>> The only sort of thing I won't try is suggestions to change the basic 
>> method I use: I know Imap *can* be made to work, so I won't switch to 
>> using something like popmail, I don't want to pop my mail.  Other than 
>> that, any suggestion will be checked, believe me.
> 
> Just to narrow down the problem, take a look at the full headers of the 
> duplicate mails and see if the mails are exact copies (i.e. the 
> duplication occurs internally) or are in fact recieved py Postfix twice. 
> Check the mail logs to see what Postfix, Dovecot and whatever else you 
> have in the mix (SpamAssassin? Procmail? Postgrey?) are doing. Also make 
> sure you're not just recieving the extra emails from some address you've 
> set to forward to your normal address.

Yup, that got it.  Your own message was dup'd to me, and I found out 
what was wrong.  When I got back to my apartment finally, from the 
extended hospital stay, all of my mail subs to chuckr at freebsd.org had 
lapsed from non-receipt.  I'd lost my old FreeBSD machine, and while I 
was still pretty disabled, it took me a long while to get the machine 
and all the smoking hardware back in service, and when I did, I 
restarted all my old subs, but because I'd lost the machine, all my old 
ssh keys went up in smoke, and I now couldn't get back into my 
freebsd.org login (remember I was a committer) so I was forced to 
restart my mail fromm my own hosts at chuckr.org.  Well, somehow, all 
the old FreeBSD.org subs kicked back in finally (they must occaisonally 
test forever, because I was laid up about 6 months).  So, all I need to 
do is to single up my  subs.  Too bad I couldn't get the new mail 
application to do what the old majordomo would do (give me the list of 
all lists a particular login name is subscribed to).

So.thanks for kicking me into doing that testing.