Help! Mailman's Digest Option Sending Too Many Digests
Hi all,
I'm one of the moderators of the Stanford University Program on Liberation Technology at http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/.
I was wondering whether someone on this list could help me. I'm experiencing a problem with Mailman's digest option where, no matter what I do, Mailman is sending too many digests daily.
I have configured the options Mailman gives me as follows:
- Can list members choose to receive list traffic bunched in digests? Yes.
- Which delivery mode is the default for new users? Regular.
- When receiving digests, which format is default? MIME.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 0.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? No.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Daily.
- Should Mailman start a new digest volume? No.
- Should Mailman send the next digest right now, if it is not empty? No.
I'm sure I'm doing something wrong, but I can't figure out what it is. If anyone on this list can help me, I will be very grateful.
Thanks,
Yosem
Here's your problem. You need to set it to something higher than 0. I use 100 for mine.
Yosem Companys wrote:
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 0.
Farokh
MCF Software...simply dependably engineered For all your computer and networking needs including hosting solutions for every need. Phone: 845-735-0210 Cell: 914-262-1594
On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:14:44 -0000, Yosem Companys <ycompanys@gmail.com>
wrote:
I'm not sure that zero has any special meaning there - just that any one
message will always cause it to send out a digest immediately. I'd try a
large number in there and set 'daily' back to yes.
= Malcolm.
-- Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Yosem Companys wrote:
This is the major problem. 0 does not mean unlimited. It means a digest will be sent with every post because any post makes a digest >= 0.
Set this to some reasonable size.
If you thought 0 was unlimited, how did you think a digest would ever be produced if not daily and not on size?
This does not mean send a digest daily. That's the previous setting. This means how often should the volume number be incremented and the issue number reset to 1.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Yosem Companys writes:
You've come to the right place. Mailman is a liberating technology!
I don't have time to look at the code, but I think this is your problem. I suspect that this needs to be positive (0 does mean infinite in many contexts, but it's not documented to mean that here).
If you really want the digest to get (almost) arbitrarily large before being sent, you could set it to 1000000 (meaning 1GB). But I think most users' mail programs will choke on that. I would say 1000 is about as large as I'd want it to go.
The digest volume has nothing to do with the number of digests sent. It's like the volume of a journal. If you only have one digest per day, you're going to have 365 volumes per year, and one issue per volume. I would guess that's not what you want.
Thank you to everyone who responded. To avoid cluttering your inbox, I'll respond to all of your questions in this one email.
I originally had the drone list options set to the following:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? MIME.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? Yes.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Daily.
That seemed to work for a while, but all of a sudden this week all the digest subscribers started complaining that they were receiving 1 digest per message.
So I went about changing the options. The first thing I thought was that the threshold was too low, so I increased it. Since I had read on the web that zero meant unlimited, I did that. I now realize that the documentation on those sites must be wrong, as it is correct on the "List Administration Manual," to which one of you drew my attention: https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-admin/node19.html. In any case, this explains why when I would send a message that only said TEST in the subject, a new digest was created.
Once the logical thing did not work, I wrote to ask for your help. But, as I had subscribers dropping out like flies, I played around with the options until I found a configuration that stopped the problem. This was achieved with the following:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? No.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Weekly.
Now I realize that what probably fixed the problem was the combination of "Plain" and "300." Given that, I will keep that threshold, change the options to the following, and cross my fingers:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? Yes.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Monthly.
I assume 300 is more than enough for plain text.
Thanks all for your help! :)
Yosem
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Yosem Companys wrote:
This is all good.
This is probably not what you want.
If the settings were unchanged, there was some other issue. Were the same messages repeated in the subsequent digests? What was logged in Mailman's error log?
Actually, the manual you cite is wrong too. I'll fix it.
This only affects the default for new subscribers and has no bearing on digest frequency anyway.
This may make a difference if the issue is that cron/senddigests is being run many times a day instead of just once.
As I said, plain has nothing to do with it. The issue is either cron/senddigests run too frequently in which case "Should a digest be dispatched daily" will make the difference, or it is some other underlying problem which has bee fixed by the site admins in the mean time.
If this starts the problem again, the issue is someone changed the frequency with which cron/senddigests is run by Mailman's crontab. If not, the problem was something else outside your list settyings, and someone else fixed it.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Here's your problem. You need to set it to something higher than 0. I use 100 for mine.
Yosem Companys wrote:
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 0.
Farokh
MCF Software...simply dependably engineered For all your computer and networking needs including hosting solutions for every need. Phone: 845-735-0210 Cell: 914-262-1594
On Mon, 04 Mar 2013 21:14:44 -0000, Yosem Companys <ycompanys@gmail.com>
wrote:
I'm not sure that zero has any special meaning there - just that any one
message will always cause it to send out a digest immediately. I'd try a
large number in there and set 'daily' back to yes.
= Malcolm.
-- Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/
Yosem Companys wrote:
This is the major problem. 0 does not mean unlimited. It means a digest will be sent with every post because any post makes a digest >= 0.
Set this to some reasonable size.
If you thought 0 was unlimited, how did you think a digest would ever be produced if not daily and not on size?
This does not mean send a digest daily. That's the previous setting. This means how often should the volume number be incremented and the issue number reset to 1.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Yosem Companys writes:
You've come to the right place. Mailman is a liberating technology!
I don't have time to look at the code, but I think this is your problem. I suspect that this needs to be positive (0 does mean infinite in many contexts, but it's not documented to mean that here).
If you really want the digest to get (almost) arbitrarily large before being sent, you could set it to 1000000 (meaning 1GB). But I think most users' mail programs will choke on that. I would say 1000 is about as large as I'd want it to go.
The digest volume has nothing to do with the number of digests sent. It's like the volume of a journal. If you only have one digest per day, you're going to have 365 volumes per year, and one issue per volume. I would guess that's not what you want.
Thank you to everyone who responded. To avoid cluttering your inbox, I'll respond to all of your questions in this one email.
I originally had the drone list options set to the following:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? MIME.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? Yes.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Daily.
That seemed to work for a while, but all of a sudden this week all the digest subscribers started complaining that they were receiving 1 digest per message.
So I went about changing the options. The first thing I thought was that the threshold was too low, so I increased it. Since I had read on the web that zero meant unlimited, I did that. I now realize that the documentation on those sites must be wrong, as it is correct on the "List Administration Manual," to which one of you drew my attention: https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-admin/node19.html. In any case, this explains why when I would send a message that only said TEST in the subject, a new digest was created.
Once the logical thing did not work, I wrote to ask for your help. But, as I had subscribers dropping out like flies, I played around with the options until I found a configuration that stopped the problem. This was achieved with the following:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? No.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Weekly.
Now I realize that what probably fixed the problem was the combination of "Plain" and "300." Given that, I will keep that threshold, change the options to the following, and cross my fingers:
- When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
- How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
- Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached? Yes.
- How often should a new digest volume be started? Monthly.
I assume 300 is more than enough for plain text.
Thanks all for your help! :)
Yosem
On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen@xemacs.org> wrote:
Yosem Companys wrote:
This is all good.
This is probably not what you want.
If the settings were unchanged, there was some other issue. Were the same messages repeated in the subsequent digests? What was logged in Mailman's error log?
Actually, the manual you cite is wrong too. I'll fix it.
This only affects the default for new subscribers and has no bearing on digest frequency anyway.
This may make a difference if the issue is that cron/senddigests is being run many times a day instead of just once.
As I said, plain has nothing to do with it. The issue is either cron/senddigests run too frequently in which case "Should a digest be dispatched daily" will make the difference, or it is some other underlying problem which has bee fixed by the site admins in the mean time.
If this starts the problem again, the issue is someone changed the frequency with which cron/senddigests is run by Mailman's crontab. If not, the problem was something else outside your list settyings, and someone else fixed it.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (5)
-
Farokh Irani -
Malcolm Austen -
Mark Sapiro -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Yosem Companys