Rescuing Misdirected Mail from Moderation Queue - possible?
All --
I have a problem I hope you can help me with. I am a owner/manager of about a dozen interrelated lists and we've just discovered that about 50 posts which should have been delivered to the French-language list were actually being sent to the English language list.
Is it possible to actually have them sent to the correct list with their original date/time?
Here's the details:
-- All lists are announce-only, with approval passwords, and explicit address restrictions. -- The messages incorrectly sent to the English list are being held in that list's moderation queue because they have the wrong password, as they should be.
I'm wondering if it is possible to somehow copy/move/duplicate the moderation queue of the English list into the French list, then use the moderation webpage to 'accept' the posts for delivery. Since I have complete root access to the server running Mailman, I can do whatever I like at the file system level and then refresh Mailman.
So, a couple of questions about this idea:
- If this is a feasible method, with the accepted posts come with their original date/time?
- Will Mailman appropriately strip out the 'Approved:password' line when a message is released from the moderation queue, or will it deliver the message in it's entirety?
- Do I need to temporarily update the require_explicit_address option in the French list, or will accepting the posts from the moderation queue override that preference?
Are there other ways to achieve what I'm looking to do?
Thanks in Advance, Drew Tenenholz
On 02/03/2014 07:01 AM, Drew Tenenholz wrote:
Is it possible to actually have them sent to the correct list with their original date/time?
There are at least two ways to do this. The messages are in Mailman's data/ directory as files with names like heldmsg-LIST-nnn.ext where LIST is the listname, nnn is a sequence number and ext is either 'pck' if mm_cfg.HOLD_MESSAGES_AS_PICKLES is True (the default) or 'txt' if it is False.
One way would be to extract the messages from the heldmsg-*.pck files (or just use them as if they're .txt) and queue them to the correct list's incoming queue with Mailman's bin/inject command. The tricky part here is if the heldmsg-* files are pickles, extracting the message requires a separate step, but something like
for f in `ls data/heldmsg-englishlist-*.pck; do bin/show_qfiles $f | bin/inject -l frenchlist rm $f done
should work, or just
for f in `ls data/heldmsg-englishlist-*.msg; do bin/inject -l frenchlist $f rm $f done
for the .msg case.
Another way is to use the script at http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/hold_again. This requires renaming all the heldmsg-englishlist-* files to heldmsg-frenchlist-*, while preserving the extension an then running
/path/to/hold_again -l frenchlist
So, a couple of questions about this idea:
- If this is a feasible method, with the accepted posts come with their original date/time?
Yes, with either method.
- Will Mailman appropriately strip out the 'Approved:password' line when a message is released from the moderation queue, or will it deliver the message in it's entirety?
The Approved: password will be stripped.
- Do I need to temporarily update the require_explicit_address option in the French list, or will accepting the posts from the moderation queue override that preference?
You will need to turn off require_explicit_destination or add the english list to acceptable_aliases or the messages will be held by the french list.
After doing either method, the admindb page for the english list will show a bunch of "Message with id nnn was lost." messages the first time it is visited. This is harmless.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
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Drew Tenenholz -
Mark Sapiro