Weird things with Dada

[sfollmer]

I finally took the plunge and installed/configured dadamail, which took me longer than I had hoped for. I enabled dada_bridge as I want to use my email list as discussion lists and I have several lists with one list containing ~70 email addresses and 7 with less than 20 per list . I have a cron job processing the lists every 5 minutes, and I adjusted the send rate to 1 email per 10 seconds. My account email quota is 500/hr.

But as the use of dada increased, I have experienced weird things, and this is related to the smaller but more active email list.

1. The server has to restart quite a bit. I would appreciate any insight into the reasons why dada has to restart.

2. On occasion, the server just dies. When I monitor the process via a browser, I get the following error message:

Metadata about Mass Mailing is missing/corrupted or an internal process goofed up.
Mass Mailing will be paused and cannot be resumed.

I have to end up killing the process as it prevents other email messages from getting processed. Of course sometimes I don't discover this until a couple days go by so this is a real bummer!

3. Sometimes the time related to the process is in the years (underflow?) instead of the minutes as reported by dada.

4. Some of the email recipients receive an email but with no actual content. I have a wild guess it's related to the server restarting but heck if I know!

Has anyone else run across these kinds of things?

Are there better solutions for implementing discussion lists? I really like how with Dada, you can simply send an email to an address and then it gets sent out to the list as oppose to having to use a webpage to send an email.

Thanks so much for your help,

Scott

[shadmego]

Greetings and welcome to the community!

I'm not a Dada expert, but I think I can help with a couple of your issues. First though, I would like to clear something up.

1. I'm not sure what you mean by the server having to restart. Do you mean the server that yours (and several hundred other) accounts are hosting on? Like host###.hostmonster.com? Or do you mean server as in the dada mail server? If the former, then HM would know about this and you would too as your account would definately be terminated or suspended. If the latter, I would suspect that you would find good information from the logs that dada creates.

By the way, how did you set the program up? Did you use the advanced settings or did you use the basic set up? The logs (errors.txt) will be in different locations depending on your answer to this question.

As for the rest of your issues, here are my recommendations:

2 & 3 seem to be related to me in that your cron process might not have enough time to finish before it starts again. This can cause severe server issues and might be the reason your process is hanging and/or being killed without your knowing. Try increasing the amount of time your cron runs from every 5 to every 10 or 15 minutes. If you are still getting the error, try increasing some more, or check your errors.txt log again for any new info. You might also ask Support if they can see anything in their logs about this issue, though they do not provide support for Dada Mail.

4. I don't have a solution to this, though from what you say, it could very well be related to the above two issues as well. Again, play with the cron settings and read the errors.txt log, where ever it might be located.

If you need more help, don't be afraid to post back here.

~regards

[sfollmer]

Thanks for the reply shadmego,

1. You're right, it's the dada mail server that is restarting. There are no error logs associated with HM so I don't think I'm rocking the boat. All I see in the logs is that "Restarting List Sending Internal ID blahblahblah" from time to time. Perhaps I need to increase the verboseness somehow.

I used Simple Scripts to set up DADA and changed a few entries in the external config file. The logs I'm looking at are in the .dada_files/.logs/dada.txt file. There doesn't seem to be any other logs to look at.

I investigated further and found that I needed to change where the error logs are placed so I had to edit the Config.pm file. Once I did that, some errors were reported about undefined variables in the MassSend.pm and Config.pm files so I added some additional variables (sorry can't remember what they were). I'm glad I know Perl or otherwise I would have been lost!


2. I don't know if messing with the cron intervals will do much as it checks to see if it's doing something and if it is, it stops. I saw this when I ran the command manually. I'll change the interval to see what happens. Sometimes it's taking multiple hours just to send to 10 or so addresses so hopefully I don't have to increase the interval that much!

Additional... I ran across something called auto_pickup.pl and it seems like one needs to run this via cron. It also said something about dada_bridge having the same functionality in it but suggested one could run them both but staggering when they are run. Any thoughts on this?


Another weird thing... I have an email address on one list (list1) but not another (list2). When I send email to list1, I get a notice that I'm not on list2 and I need to add myself if I am to post to it. I was on list2 at one time but then I unsubscribed. So maybe there is corruption between lists? Very puzzling... maybe I should delete all my lists and repopulate them again.


Thanks again for any help!

Scott

[Delton]

This post came just in time. I was about to install Dadamail but if you are having this kind of trouble with it I would be lost.

I know Pearl pretty well but the problem is, my wife knows her also and said I had better stay away from her.

I hope you get the problem worked out but I think I'll just stay with an
autoresponder.

Best to you,
Delton

[sfollmer]

Boy did my error log file fill up once I enabled it!!!

Judging from the slew of messages, it appears that the email message is lost as it's processing it, which in turn causes all these integrity check errors which shuts down Dada until human intervention is required. I think it temporary stores the message in a .tmp directory and when it bombed out, it was complaining the file wasn't there anymore.

So I'm bailing on Dada... this behavior is way above my head and I don't have the time to spend on this anymore. So I played around with the built in mail list in HM which is really mailman.

I love mailman! The GUI is not as pretty as Dada but it sure does work a lot better! Plus I was up and running with all my lists within a couple hours instead of the multiple hours I spent on Dada. Email messages are processed and resent out immediately and it works as a discussion list. My largest list is 80 addresses so hopefully it won't grow too large where mailman pushes the envelope. At least now Comcast is accepting all the emails via this list (as opposed to via the email forwarders).

Anyways, good luck to those trying to setup Dada... I really liked the feature set but it just seemed too kludgy to me.

Scott

[shadmego]

I wonder if there was a problem with the installation. I have never had any issues like this with Dada Mail and I've been using it on two different sites (each with multiple lists) for a couple of years. Granted, I still haven't installed the latest version, but I can't imagine the program is that unstable.

I might point the author to this thread so he can become aware of the issue. I might have to put up a test installation of the new version so I can see if I get the same behavior.

~regards, and sorry it didn't work out for you. I actually went from mailman to dada mail.

~regards again