[Mailman-Users] Phantom moderation pending requests & heldmsg files

[Chris Waltham]

On May 7, 2008, at 4:07 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

>>> I looked at my heldmsg files (all 40,000 of them :-)) and there  
>>> are a
>> number patterns. Most heldmsg files are from a handful of lists  
>> (let's
>> call them baseball and football). If I do a dumpdb of the hockey
>> list's pending.pck file, this is the output:
>>
>> [mailman at list ~/bin]$ ./dumpdb ../lists/hockey/pending.pck
>> [----- start pickle file -----]
>> <----- start object 1 ----->
>> {   '6183e43cf99b4a6850537d2a4837b26886bade2a': ('H', 5145),
>>    'd22c46a0b5c704ec8be5c63a791e53adc23dc7fc': ('H', 5146),
>>    'df7eae0e0a275c43b9c4bfb8d5f037df578e6cc2': ('H', 5147),
>
>
> Note that the entries in lists/hockey/pending.pck are only the
> confirmation tokens and they expire after (default) 3 days, so there
> may normally be lots of held messages that are not in pending.pck.

Okay.

> The tokens in pending.pck are for the submitter of the held message to
> be able to cancel the post or for the admin/moderator to be able to
> cancel or approve the post by email. They have nothing to do with
> what's in the admindb interface which is controlled by what's in the
> request.pck file.

Okay. :-) That clears up things very well, thank you.

[mailman at list ~/lists/hockey]$ dumpdb request.pck | grep heldmsg | wc -l
3835


>> Now, the first line ends with the value "5145". Here is what I can
>> find on the filesystem:
>>
>> [mailman at list ~/data]$ ls -al heldmsg-hockey* | grep 5145
>> -rw-rw-r--  1 mailman mailman   3395 May  4 12:54 heldmsg-
>> hockey-5145.pck
>>
>> I rinsed & repeated that process with the other two entries in the
>> pending.pck file, i.e. 5146 and 5147. For both of those two, I can
>> find heldmsg-hockey-NNNN.pck (where NNNN equals the ID above).
>> However, I still have an awful lot of heldmsg-hockey files that
>> are .txt files, not .pck files:
>
>
> The fact that they are .txt files is not a problem per se. As long as
> there are entries in request.pck for them, they should appear in the
> admindb interface and can be approved if you wish, or rejected or
> discarded.

Now if I run bin/discard, that will discard all the messages in  
request.pck, right? As per this FAQ entry: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.074.htp

Can you think of an easy way to discard all the messages in  
request.pck _except those_ which still have tokens remaining in  
pending.pck?


Chris