[Mailman-Users] How to stop sendmail from spewing messages one itstarts?

[John W. Baxter]

On 12/8/05 6:12 PM, "Mark Sapiro" <msapiro at value.net> wrote:

> Paul Williams wrote:
>> 
>> 1).   A user added a large number of subscribers by uploading
>>      an Excel spreadsheet.  Mailman accepted the file and
>>      addresses appeared reasonable when viewed with IE but
>>      not so good with mozilla (each alpha char was followed by
>>      a box).   I was able to remove the names using the
>>      remove_members command by removing all members.
>> 
>>      It seems that it might be a good check when importing a
>>      list of users, for mailman to make sure it is a text file
>>      so users don't mess things up inadvertantly.
> 
> 
> What Mailman version is this? Current Mailman (2.1.6) is pretty good
> about weeding out addresses with non-printable ascii characters. In
> particular, it won't accept whatever characters were displaying as a
> 'box'.

Is Excel perhaps producing UTF-16?


> 
> 
>> 2).   The second problem that developed is that the user has
>>      set notification on subscribing to yes and so she and
>>      her boss bere getting several thousand emails.
>>      I finally had to completely delete the list.
>>      Is there a better way to tell mailman to stop sending email
>>      from a specific list?   If that is possible, I have not
>>      bumped into an explanation how mailman works so I would
>>      be able to stop it sending emails.
> 
> 
> Mass subscribe allows subscribing with or without notifications
> regardless of list settings.

This is very much repairing the barn door after the horse is stolen, but for
such mass subscribes from previously-untested data, sending through a sample
of 10 or so addresses first isn't a bad idea.

  --John (cheering from the sidelines)