[Mailman-Users] Help! Mailman's Digest Option Sending Too Many Digests

[Yosem Companys]

Thank you to everyone who responded. To avoid cluttering your inbox, I'll
respond to all of your questions in this one email.

I originally had the drone list options set to the following:

   - When receiving digests, which format is default? MIME.
   - How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
   - Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached?
   Yes.
   - How often should a new digest volume be started? Daily.

That seemed to work for a while, but all of a sudden this week all the
digest subscribers started complaining that they were receiving 1 digest
per message.

So I went about changing the options.  The first thing I thought was that
the threshold was too low, so I increased it.  Since I had read on the web
that zero meant unlimited, I did that.  I now realize that the
documentation on those sites must be wrong, as it is correct on the "List
Administration Manual," to which one of you drew my attention:
https://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-admin/node19.html.  In any
case, this explains why when I would send a message that only said TEST in
the subject, a new digest was created.

Once the logical thing did not work, I wrote to ask for your help.  But, as
I had subscribers dropping out like flies, I played around with the options
until I found a configuration that stopped the problem.  This was achieved
with the following:

   - When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
   - How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
   - Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached?
   No.
   - How often should a new digest volume be started? Weekly.

Now I realize that what probably fixed the problem was the combination of
"Plain" and "300."  Given that, I will keep that threshold, change the
options to the following, and cross my fingers:

   - When receiving digests, which format is default? Plain.
   - How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 300.
   - Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't reached?
   Yes.
   - How often should a new digest volume be started? Monthly.

I assume 300 is more than enough for plain text.

Thanks all for your help! :)

Yosem



On Tue, Mar 5, 2013 at 6:39 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
wrote:
> Yosem Companys writes:
>  > Hi all,
>  >
>  > I'm one of the moderators of the Stanford University Program on
Liberation
>  > Technology at http://liberationtechnology.stanford.edu/.
>
> You've come to the right place.  Mailman is a liberating technology!
>
>  > I was wondering whether someone on this list could help me.  I'm
>  > experiencing a problem with Mailman's digest option where, no matter
what I
>  > do, Mailman is sending too many digests daily.
>  >
>  > I have configured the options Mailman gives me as follows:
>  >
>  >    - Can list members choose to receive list traffic bunched in
digests?
>  >    Yes.
>  >    - Which delivery mode is the default for new users? Regular.
>  >    - When receiving digests, which format is default? MIME.
>  >    - How big in Kb should a digest be before it gets sent out? 0.
>
> I don't have time to look at the code, but I think this is your
> problem.  I suspect that this needs to be positive (0 does mean
> infinite in many contexts, but it's not documented to mean that here).
>
> If you really want the digest to get (almost) arbitrarily large before
> being sent, you could set it to 1000000 (meaning 1GB).  But I think
> most users' mail programs will choke on that.  I would say 1000 is
> about as large as I'd want it to go.
>
>  >    - Should a digest be dispatched daily when the size threshold isn't
>  >    reached? No.
>  >    - How often should a new digest volume be started? Daily.
>
> The digest volume has nothing to do with the number of digests sent.
> It's like the volume of a journal.  If you only have one digest per
> day, you're going to have 365 volumes per year, and one issue per
> volume.  I would guess that's not what you want.
>
>  >    - Should Mailman start a new digest volume? No.
>  >    - Should Mailman send the next digest right now, if it is not
empty? No.
>