[Mailman-Users] Attempting to update Mailman, but qfiles/* has files

[Mark Sapiro]

Dennis Carr wrote:
>
>I'm attempting to update Mailman through aptitude, but it warns me that 
>all files in the qfiles tree will be wiped out.  This includes files that 
>have been bouncing back and forth between qfiles/out and qfiles/retry. 
>It's not quite clear as to when these messages have landed there.


Move the files from qfiles/retry aside somewhere. You may need to do
this more than once if files have been moved from retry to out for
processing and haven't finished.


>Moreover, I noted that I have a good sized stack of messages in 
>qfiles/bad - which I'm not too worried about, since the dates are pretty 
>old.


See the posts at
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2011-April/071484.html>
and
<http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2011-April/071486.html>
for information about the qfiles/bad entries. You can move these aside
too if you wish, or just look at them in place, or ignore them.

Look at the files from the retry queue with 'bin/dumpdb -p'. This will
show you the message and the metadata. The metadata contains the
undelivered recipient list. If the addresses are in fact bad, you can
just ignore that file, but you might want to consider whether you want
your MTA to be returning a retryable status for these addresses.
(Hint: if this is Postfix, you may want to set
'unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550' in main.cf.)

If there are any you want to keep from qfiles/retry, you can move them
back after the upgrade.

There is no point in moving back any qfiles/bad files as they have only
been saved for forensic analysis and nothing further will be done with
them by Mailman.

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