Nested distribution lists

[Britt]

I'm currently using several nested distribution lists and I noticed a strange problem today. I work for a school system, and all schools and administrative departments have their own lists, and then master lists for all elementary, all middle, and all high school accounts. On top of all of this I have a top level distribution list that then sends to each of these lists.

So.... school1 and school2 are members of _middleschools, _middleschools is a member of _everyone. Sending to _everyone sends to school1 and school2. This works pretty well until I add all my groups in.

I've got 2269 users, and when I add the nested distribution lists piece by piece, everything sends to a certain point, and then some of the distribution lists get dropped, and I recieve Postfix error messages like so:

This is the Postfix program at host mta.rcps.info.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster>

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The Postfix program

<_rvjdc@rcps.info>: rcps.info

Is there an upper limit to number of recipients that can be sent in a single distribution list? Or perhaps a limit on nested levels? The groups that get dropped are mostly consistent, but not completely, and are not alphabetical by either the top-level distribution lists or by the lowest level distribution lists.

I'm using 4.5.2 GA 699 MACOSX FOSS installation on OSX Server 10.4.8.

Thanks

[jhaefele]

We've seen the same thing at our high school.

Distribution list: wholeschool@school.org

• classof2013@school.org
• classof2012@school.org
• classof2011@school.org
• classof2010@school.org
• facstaff@school.org

Each of the classes get the message, but nobody in facstaff@school.org does.

The total of the first four lists is ~1050 users, with an additional 175 in facstaff. We're receiving no error messages, and the students all seem to be getting the announcements bulletins we're sending out via this list (though it's impossible to say; it could simply be that no students have reported any problem).

Any help on this would be fantastic.

[pat_allen]

We're considering migrating from Exchange to Zimbra and have multiple nested distribution lists. Was this issue ever identified and resolved? THANKS!

[jhaefele]

This problem went away at some point, though I can't necessarily pinpoint when it happened. Possibly in a minor version upgrade, possibly when we went to 6.x. It is definitely working, though, as I just received a message addressed to the whole school in the last couple of days.

A somewhat-unrelated issue we encountered with students was that many of our students forward their messages to an external, personal account, and that messages delivered to a nested distro wouldn't forward. The message would land in their Inbox, but not get forwarded on. This did not happen when the message was sent to the classof2013@school.org address, however; in these cases the messages were forwarded normally. This also seems to have been resolved, though.

All things considered, we've been extremely happy with our Zimbra installation, and would recommend it. The web client is robust, server setup is a relative breeze (in testing, we went from download to installed, functional server [including LDAP integration] in < 3 hours), and with ActiveSync masquerading, our smart phone users are happy. There are some minor issues I've had in the past with UI, but even those have apparently been resolved in version 7, to which we'll be migrating this summer.

Feel free to e-mail with any specific questions.

[pat_allen]

Thanks for the great response. We'll be going straight to version 7 so there shouldn't be any issues there. We're a relatively small organization (~300 mailboxes) but we're a scientific research institute so we've got some pretty demanding (and diverse) users.

Just out of curiosity, how long have you been using Zimbra and what did you migrate from? Have there been any server outages since you've been using it?