[Mailman-Users] New crontab query: senddigests

[Mark Sapiro]

Savoy, Jim wrote:
>
>>Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>>Running cron/senddigests will send a digest for any list which has a
>>digest.mbox file and for which digest_send_periodic=yes regardless of
>>how big the digest is.
>
>This is where we part ways.
>
>Without the senddigests cron job, isn't the above statement also true
>anyway?


No.


>Because the digest_sent_periodic=yes setting also doesn't care
>if the digest.mbox is over 30K. It just sends out a message "daily"
>(what
>time, I do not know) whenever a digest.mbox exists.


It relies on cron/senddigests being run in order to do this and "daily"
is whenever cron/senddigests runs and could be "twice daily" or "Mon,
Wed and Fri" or whatever depending on when cron/senddigests runs.


>So my question was: Is the only reason you run the cron job in the first
>place,
>Is to force that "daily" run to a specific time (eg noon)? I say this
>because I
>have never ran that cron job, but I'm pretty sure everyone gets their
>digests
>anyway.


Either they were only getting digests when the size threshold was
reached, or if they were getting them daily at a specific time, then
something was running cron/senddigests at that time.


>> So, if you ran it and nothing happened, there were no such lists. This
>seems
>>unlikely. Are you sure no digests were sent?
>
>I guess it's possible no digest.mboxes exist. There aren't that many
>digest
>users here.
>
>>And yes, running it at noon daily forces the periodic digests at noon,
>>but you can chose another time. I prefer mine to go over night so I
>>run cron/senddigests daily at 03:30.
>
>I will probably set it up to run at 3:00 am as well. I just ran it at
>12:48
>today so I could watch it (do nothing (!)).
>
>I suppose I should change the setting that sends a digest if it exceeds
>30K
>too (change it to 1000K or something, so that people never get more than
>one
>digest-per-day), and just use the cron job to send once a day,
>regardless of size,
>at 3:00. I just am not clear on why I need a cronjob to do that, unless
>its
>only purpose is to force a specific time.


You need the cron job because nothing else in Mailman sends digests
periodically. The only other mechanism sends a digest when the list's
digest.mbox exceeds a certain size, which may not happen for weeks on
a low traffic list.

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