[Mailman-Users] outgoing message wedged in the queue

[Leonard Jacobs]

Mailman users --

I have been running Mailman 2.0beta4 on a Sun OS 5.7 with python 1.5.2 and sendmail 8. Everything seemed to be going along fine with several smallish test lists I had set up, and so I decided to transfer one of my larger (~3,500 names) to Mailman.

I ran the command line script to add the members, and they seemed to have received the welcome message fine. However, when I tried emailing this new list several days later, somehow the message got wedged and kept getting mailed to this same group, each member receiving around 25 copies (or more!) of the same message!

Once I discovered this problem, I tried to stop the mailing
by removing the message in the data directory, deleting the qfiles, turning off the cron call to qrunner, and deleting all messages in the mail queue. Nothing worked and the messages kept queing up.

Then I removed all the members from the list, running the remove member script. This also did not stop the mail. Finally I deleted the aliases for the new list in the aliases file and reran newalises. This stopped the mail storm.

So my questions are:
1. Any clues as to the cause of this multiple message dilemma?

2. Is there a simple way to stop Mailman messages from being mailed, once the process begins?

Thanks for any help and advice.

==============================================
 Leonard Jacobs
 Shambhala Publications
 (617) 424-0030