[Mailman-Users] Phantom moderation pending requests & heldmsg files

[Mark Sapiro]

Chris Waltham wrote:

>A couple of weeks ago our Mailman 2.0 server crashed (a physical  
>problem, it wasn't Mailman's fault!) and we had to upgrade to 2.1 in a  
>real hurry. As a result, I had to copy the entire ~mailman/data  
>directory... which may not have been such a good idea:
>
>[mailman at list ~/data]$ ls -al | wc -l
>40054
>
>There are a _lot_ of files prefixed with "heldmsg-" in the data  
>directory, as you can see. There are entries all the way back to 2005,  
>in fact! I realize that I'm going to have to deal with all those files  
>at some stage, but I currently have another problem.


Depending on what else you did, these files may now be orphans, but see
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.074.htp>.


>A user  
>administers a list called "ams-announce", and they are receiving  
>emails with the subject "The AMS-announce at list.bowdoin.edu mailing  
>list has 31 request(s) waiting for your consideration". However, when  
>they or I go to the admin interface, there are no pending requests.  
>The user has been getting the same message for more than a week now,  
>always with the same amount (31) of pending messages but there are  
>never actually any messages there for the admin to discard.
>
>Oddly, there are no files prefixed with "heldmsg-ams-announce" in the / 
>home/mailman/data directory, however I did grep for the string "ams- 
>announce" in _all_ heldmsg files and there are many matches --  
>virtually all of it looks like spam. I suppose, then, that I have two  
>questions:
>
>* how can I print how many moderation requests a list has pending, and  
>is there a way to flush the pending requests from the command-line?  
>(The FAQ entries deal with doing it via the web interface, before  
>2.1.5's feature of "discard all messages")
>* can I print a list of what lists have what files pending in the  
>format of heldmsg-$listname-$msgID, so that I can cross-reference the  
>files I have on the filesystem (many of which are really old) with  
>what the lists think need to be delievered?


First of all, the bogus '31 ams-announce moderator request(s)' email is
almost certainly not coming from your current Mailman 2.1.9
installation. I have never seen a report of a case like this where the
email was not coming from some old/backup/test/whatever installation
whose cron/checkdbs was still being run.

Second, the '31' has nothing to do with data/heldmsg-* files. These
files have the messages themselves, but not the pending request
information. The data for the 'moderator request(s)' email come from
the lists/listname/request.pck file. If you want to see what's there,
you can dump it with bin/dumpdb, and you can clear it by simply
removing the file, although if you dump it first, I think you'll see
it's devoid of requests just like the admindb interface says.

As far as getting a list of what messages are pending for each list in
the form heldmsg-$listname-$msgID is concerned, there's nothing that
will give you that in a nice list, but if you go to a specific list's
request.pck file and dump it with bin/dumpdb, you'll see one entry like

'version': (0, 1)

and for each held message, entries like

id: (1, (time, sender, subject, reason, filename, msgdata))

and entries with 2 or 3 as the first item of the value which are held
subscribe and unsubscribe requests.

In the held message entries, the key, id, is the number you call
$msgID; time is the time in seconds that the message was held; sender,
subject and reason are self explanitory; filename is the name of the
held message file and msgdata is a dictionary of the message's
metadata at the time it was held.

Note that if you have any request.db files, these are residue from your
prior installation. I don't know if you did an actual upgrade of your
2.0 installation to 2.1.9, but if you did, the data from the
request,db files should have been automatically migrated to the
request.pck files by bin/update as part of the 2.1.9 install. If that
isn't what happened, then I'm not sure what you're faced with in terms
of recovering any held messages.

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