[Mailman-Users] Tricky admin_immed_notify problem

[Savoy, Jim]

>> Jim Savoy wrote:

>> Reading this reminded me that I have a similar problem. All of our
lists
>> are set by default to be admin_immed_notify=yes, but the list owners
only
>> get a message when something new arrives (that is put on hold). They
>> never get a daily reminder about the queued-up stuff. Is this a known
problem
>> for v2.1.5 (we will be upgrading to v2.1.12 this summer). I have no
idea how
>> long this has been going on, and only remembered it because I own one
of the
>> lists and realized that I only get the one warning.

>Mark Shapiro wrote:

>The daily summary is sent by cron/checkdbs.

>Does mailman have a crontab? Does it have an entry to run cron/checkdbs
daily? Is crond running?


Hi Mark,

   The answers to your questions are: yes, yes & yes. But I don't think
the person
who installed Mailman many years ago ever did the "crontab -u mailman
crontab.in"
bit, so I just did it now. First I commented out everything in that
crontab.in file
except the checkdbs line, and set that to run immediately. It worked
like a charm
and sent out hundreds of reminders to all list owners.

  I am not all that familiar with cron. Is that "crontab -u mailman
crontab.in"
something you need to run every time you reboot the system? Or does it
add something
to /etc/cron.d or /etc/cron.daily or /etc/crontab? (I don't see anything
new in those).

  But I noticed that many of the reminders it sent out, pointing people
to the
admindb page were blank (ie there is nothing pending). So I'm not sure
what that
means. There aren't that many .pck files in /mailman/data and I am not
sure where
else it is pulling that false information from. The next run is set for
8:00 am
tomorrow, but I might have to put it on hold until I find out why there
are so many
bogus warnings going out. If someone was to clear out a bunch of pending
requests
from the mailman/data directory just by deleting them, instead of doing
it properly
with the admindb web interface, would that cause this problem? If so,
can I remedy
this somehow? Any pointers would be helpful. I don't fully understand
all of the
workings of Mailman (like many of the others on this list - I just sort
of babysit it
and we've never had too many problems). Thanks!