[Mailman-Users] howto cancell a message

[Jonathan Dill]

lluisgomez at hangar.org wrote:
> hi people, just a begginer question :
>
> if i send a wrong message to a mailman list, there is a way to stop  
> delivering this message?
>   
Unless you have a slow server, a very large mailing lists, or a slow 
internet connection, by the time that you decide to stop the message, it 
is probably already too late.  If this is for example an announcements 
list / newsletter, the best thing is to have all messages moderated, or 
even set up a separate "test" list so that you can do a "dry run" to 
make sure everything looks OK before you send it out to the real list.

I have a client with a ~50,000 subscriber newsletter that goes out once 
a week, and they always send it out to an internal test list first so 
they can check for spelling errors or anything else that might be 
embarrassing before the message goes out.  Even so, I did have to abort 
the newsletter on a couple occasions.  By the time that they realized 
that there was a problem, mailman had already done its job, all of the 
messages were sitting in the postfix queue.  At that point, the exact 
procedure depends on what mail server you are using e.g. postfix, qmail, 
sendmail etc.

Jonathan