Christopher Hatty wrote:

One of our mailman lists sends a daily message saying that it has over 8,000 waiting messages in the queue. This number increases daily no matter what we do.

Trying to go to its moderation page results in a server error. The server error in question is the kind that generally requires the use of mailman/bin/discard in order to get rid of the messages.

Actually running mailman/bin/discard deletes only a few messages, and there are no remaining messages in mailman/data after this has been run. But the next day's "waiting messages" email increases, rather than decreasing or remaining constant.

I think this is the result of someone manually deleting messages from mailman/data.

That's probably correct.

Is there any way to fix the problem?

If your Mailman version is 2.1.6 or later, set General Options -> max_days_to_hold to a small non-zero number and either run cron/checkdbs manually or wiat for it to run as scheduled.

If 2.1.5 or earlier remove lists/<listname>/request.pck or lists/<listname>/request.db depending on version. In this case, you will also lose any outstanding (un)subscribe requests.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan