[Mailman-Users] How to stop sendmail from spewing messages one itstarts?

[Mark Sapiro]

Paul Williams wrote:
>
>1).   A user added a large number of subscribers by uploading
>      an Excel spreadsheet.  Mailman accepted the file and 
>      addresses appeared reasonable when viewed with IE but
>      not so good with mozilla (each alpha char was followed by
>      a box).   I was able to remove the names using the 
>      remove_members command by removing all members.
>
>      It seems that it might be a good check when importing a
>      list of users, for mailman to make sure it is a text file
>      so users don't mess things up inadvertantly.


What Mailman version is this? Current Mailman (2.1.6) is pretty good
about weeding out addresses with non-printable ascii characters. In
particular, it won't accept whatever characters were displaying as a
'box'.


>2).   The second problem that developed is that the user has
>      set notification on subscribing to yes and so she and
>      her boss bere getting several thousand emails.
>      I finally had to completely delete the list.
>      Is there a better way to tell mailman to stop sending email
>      from a specific list?   If that is possible, I have not
>      bumped into an explanation how mailman works so I would
>      be able to stop it sending emails.


Mass subscribe allows subscribing with or without notifications
regardless of list settings.

The notifications are created and placed in Mailman's virgin queue
(qfiles/virgin/) and then processed by VirginRunner and placed in the
out queue (qfiles/out). They are then picked up by OutgoingRunner and
delivered to the outgoing MTA.

You can stop Mailman (bin/mailmanctl stop) and then simply delete files
from the queues. You can use bin/show_qfiles to examine qfiles if you
are in doubt about what to delete.

Of course, none of this deals with messages that have already been
delivered to the MTA and are queued there.

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