[Mailman-Users] BIG discard problem

[Robert Echlin]

Hi,
I have a problem discarding pending messages for the admin.

One of our mail lists has accumulated over 10,000 (ten thousand) spam
messages.
The web page to show pending messages, after several minutes, maybe an hour,
still seems to be churning away, so fix methods based on looking at the web
page won't work.
There is a python process owned by Apache churning away using up 200M of
memory. Stopping /etc/init.d/mailman and closing my browser eventually kills
it.

Info:
  lists/<listname>/request.pck is over 5M.
  lists/<listname>/pending.pck is only 1263 bytes.

Stuff I looked at:
- 2004 mailman list messages.
- google for "discard mailman script"
- mailman faq (search for discard)
- docs on www.list.org
- bin/discard.py seems to require some sort of a file as input,
    but there are no docs for it on http://www.list.org/site.html,
    where other command line programs seem to be documented.
    If it's like Skip's mmdiscard.py, http://manatee.mojam.com/~skip/python/
    then it needs a file created by looking at the web interface.
- David Wolfskill's dispose.py seems to require a file input like discard.
- bulk-vette requires an include file called mailman,
  which doesn't seem to exist in my version (suggestions??)

Config:
Mailman 2.1.5 on RH Linux 9

What I think I wanna do:
DELETE the (appropriate, offending) file!!!

Actually, shut down /etc/init.d/mailman, and apache.
I should shut down sendmail, too, I expect.
Delete the file (request.pck???).
touch the filename.
chmod to match what it was.
restart stopped daemons.

Will this work?
Any better ideas?

Robert

--
Robert Echlin
Contractor - Infrastructure Specialist
rechlin at ca.stilo.com
Voice: (613) 745-4242 extension 232
Fax: (613) 745-5560

Stilo Corporation
1900 City Park Drive, Suite 504
Ottawa, Ontario, Canada    K1J 1A3
http://www.stilo.com

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