I may have asked this before, but if so I can't find it in my archives.
Is there a way to send a test message to a list without it being sent out to the entire list? Something like a ping that only replies to you?
I have a list I host for a friend that is very sporadic. When active it can get 100 posts a day, but those days come infrequently.
Sometimes he's concerned that posts are getting lost (it's happened in the past that some configuration muckup has borked the list) and he'd like to be able to check that the list is ok.
-- "A thousand years ago we thought the world was a bowl. Five hundred years ago we knew it was a globe. Today we know it is flat and round carried through space on the back of a turtle. Don't you wonder what shape it will turn out to be tomorrow?" [Lord Vetinari] --The Truth
On Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:45:43 +0100, LuKreme <kremels@kreme.com> wrote:
I may have asked this before, but if so I can't find it in my archives.
Is there a way to send a test message to a list without it being sent
out to the entire list? Something like a ping that only replies to you?I have a list I host for a friend that is very sporadic. When active it
can get 100 posts a day, but those days come infrequently.Sometimes he's concerned that posts are getting lost (it's happened in
the past that some configuration muckup has borked the list) and he'd
like to be able to check that the list is ok.
I habitually configure lists with spam filter entries of the form:
^Subject:.*test.*
Other entries contain the words 'spam', 'virus' and 'digest'. Then, if you
only want to test the process to the list, all you need do is put 'test'
into the subject line.
You could, of course, apply emergency moderation for the duration of the
test!
I'm sure there are other options (I don't have back-end shell access to my
lists) that involve stopping the outgoing mail and archive handlers.
= Malcolm.
-- Malcolm Austen, Oxfordshire, England
-----Original Message----- From: mailman-users-bounces+s.watkins=nhm.ac.uk@python.org [mailto:mailman-users-bounces+s.watkins=nhm.ac.uk@python.org] On Behalf Of Malcolm Austen
I habitually configure lists with spam filter entries of the form:
^Subject:.*test.*
Other entries contain the words 'spam', 'virus' and 'digest'. Then, if you only want to test the process to the list, all you need do is put 'test'
into the subject line.You could, of course, apply emergency moderation for the duration of the test!
I'm sure there are other options (I don't have back-end shell access to my lists) that involve stopping the outgoing mail and archive handlers.
= Malcolm.
I'm not too sure how useful this would be for testing "end-to-end" throughput. When I was a little green about the gills (or greener than I am now) wrt. Mailman I had a problem with an intermittently "unresponsive" list. I looked at most things I could think of but couldn't find the problem.
Eventually the penny dropped and I "realised" that those pesky 'runner' processes had something to do with something in particular the Incoming and Outgoing runner. Sure enough my process list showed that the Incoming runner was there but the Outgoing runner would "die". (I fixed that issue, it was something to do with directory ownerships). End result, email came into the list and then just sat there.
Anyway, if you had a spam rule then surely that'd be great for testing the message coming into the list at which point it'd be blocked (as spam) but it wouldn't test whether the message would be mailed out/forwarded to the list members.
I'm showing a bit of interest in this request as I'd like to know if there is a way of doing just this, sending a test email to an established list that only list admin and/or myself would recive to check the list is running fine.
One thought/idea I've had is to have a "test" list which has only my work email address, an offsite email address and maybe one or two of my colleagues (for verification purposes), lock it right down so that only the members can use it, add the "Me too" tag so that we'd receive any emails we sent to the list and use that to check that the mailman service is functional. Does that sound a valid way of doing it, too much effort FWIW or missing the point as it wouldn't test a particular list just the mailman service?
Regards, Steff
Steff Watkins Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD Systems programmer Email: s.watkins@nhm.ac.uk Systems Team Phone: +44 (0)20 7942 6000 opt 2
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans. - HHGTTG
Steff Watkins writes:
One thought/idea I've had is to have a "test" list which has only my work email address, an offsite email address and maybe one or two of my colleagues (for verification purposes), lock it right down so that only the members can use it, add the "Me too" tag so that we'd receive any emails we sent to the list and use that to check that the mailman service is functional. Does that sound a valid way of doing it, too much effort FWIW or missing the point as it wouldn't test a particular list just the mailman service?
This is precisely what I do.
It is possible, but unlikely, that a particular list would have a problem. For example, it could have something to do with the size of the list, such as recipient MTAs not liking too many RCPT TOs on a single message, or a fascist (message-dropping) throttle at your ISP.
But the outgoing runner doesn't care what the list is, and neither does the MTA, so the test list *is* a valid test, especially for the (fairly common, as Mailman failures go) failure case of a runner going down. At least you can rule that out.
On Thu, Jul 29, 2010 at 12:12:52PM +0100, Steff Watkins wrote:
One thought/idea I've had is to have a "test" list which has only my work email address, an offsite email address and maybe one or two of my colleagues (for verification purposes), lock it right down so that only the members can use it, add the "Me too" tag so that we'd receive any emails we sent to the list and use that to check that the mailman service is functional.
That might be one way; although useful for those of us not on some tuppence ha'penny shoe-string "ISP" who believe in limiting the amount of mail transmissions (and where the punter may not know of those limits).
Of course, MTA problems may also exist, which that approach wouldn't examine (nor do I see mention of testing the web interfaces work).
*brainfart* Perhaps a Mailman-admin's 'test suite' might be useful? And presumably have the option to run (gah!) via the web-admin interface, as well as the command line
Does that sound a valid way of doing it, too much effort FWIW or missing the point as it wouldn't test a particular list just the mailman service?
using config_list on a "troublesome" list, a spot of sed/withlist, and config_list on a new list, may be one way to transfer the list settings over; possibly followed by remove_members -a and add_members; all of that could be made into a two arguements "clonelist" script.
This doesn't, of course, help, if Mailman's not running -- never rule out (or forget about) the obvious -- nor, say if there's a lack of disk-space.
I can't remember what, if anything, was decided about test lists in MM3.
I'll be waiting for MM3, before I start fiddling with trending Mailman in Nagios; for now, my "last posts" script/output does the job well enough (and I am a lazy sysadmin) for me.
-- ``What is a committee? A group of the unwilling, picked from the unfit, to do the unnecessary.'' (Richard Harkness)
participants (5)
-
Adam McGreggor
-
LuKreme
-
Malcolm Austen
-
Steff Watkins
-
Stephen J. Turnbull