[Mailman-Users] How to configure mailman to only deliver mail a few times a day?

[Laura Creighton]

In a message of Thu, 05 Feb 2015 00:33:19 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull" writes:
>Laura Creighton writes:
>
>Hi Laura!
>
> > While some people want to continue receiving digests, and some
> > people don't, everybody is in favour of having the mail only go out
> > in batches at set intervals during the day.  So maybe once a day is
> > too infrequent, and 3 times a day would be nicer, but what is not
> > wanted is 'deliver this as soon as it arrives'.
>
>Mailman delivers as soon as the mail arrives, except for digests.
>This is not configurable in Mailman.  You might be able to run a cron
>job which starts Mailman at 0, 8, and 16 hours, and stops it at 1, 9,
>and 17 hours.  Seems kinda kludgy but should work (untested, of
>course).  I thought about just stopping the outgoing runner, but
>that's going to be really messy.

Okay then.  Nice to know I wasn't finding anything because it wasn't
there to be found. :)

>Digests are delivered when the size limit is reached (if
>digest_size_threshold > 0), or once a day (if digest_send_periodic is
>set), which ever comes first.  The size limit is set on the "Digest
>Options" view of the "Administration" page for the list.

This was the place I was sort of hoping that 'once a day' could be
changed to 'once every 6 hours', but my rather cursory glance at the
code made me conclude -- nope, not here.

>I suppose it might be possible to modify Mailman to hang on to posts
>for a few hours and send them out in batches, but this might cause a
>large load on the mail server during that period.

I can guarantee that this would not be a problem for our particular
user community. ;)  Even if every one of us decided to passionately
wade in and post to the max on a huge-and-pointless flame war -- there
still aren't enough of us to provide a large load.  But your point is
well-taken.  The flame-war part is precisely why people want deliveries
to be once, or a few times a day.  The belief is that people who have to
think about what they are writing -- as they only get one crack at it every
24 hours -- produce more reasoned responses than those people who are more
accustomed to shooting from the hip and then apologising later if they
turn out to be wrong.

Thus in the eternal 'give mailman 3.0 everything that we cannot do now'
discussion, a 'cool-down' period has just now shown up as a thing that
real users have been asking for, and which would have ended up as a
blocker for moving from 25 year old software to mailman -- except that
if I cannot convince them I know how to hack a cron job, then I am
just rubbish as a spokesman, and that's all. :)

Thanks very much Stephen.  Always a pleasure.

Laura