[Mailman-Users] Test mesages

[Mark Sapiro]

LuKreme 
>
>The trouble with this suggestion (and others) is that all it does is  
>stop the messages once it gets to the list. What I want to see is the  
>'full loop' of the message as I send it, and as it gets sent back to me.


Which by definition you can't strictly do because you have to alter the
outgoing process in some way to remove the other recipients so you are
not testing the original process.


>As an example, I was checking on a list that hadn't seen any traffic  
>in a few months, and I sent a test message
>
>Subject: Test, please ignore
>Body: don't reply to this, it's just a test.
>
>That generated *FIFTEEN* replies all acknowledging receipt of the test.
>
>Obviously, not a techie list, but still. So I was thinking it would be  
>nice if I could send a message to the list and get the message back,  
>but only to me and not distributed to the other subscribers.
>
>Or maybe there's something else I should do? Basically, I wanted to  
>tail -f /var/log/maillog and watch the message come in and get sent to  
>ensure the list was working properly.


So you don't trust Mailman. If you did, using any test list would
verify that Mailman's delivery was operational and using the subject
list with something that causes the message to be held would verify
that the input pipeline for this list was working up to the handler
that held the message and that generation and delivery of the held
message notice was all working. The only thing not verified in this
scenario is the remainder of the input pipeline for this list. If you
don't trust that that will work the same as for the test list, then
you also can't trust that just because it works for the modified
recipient list, it will also work for the full list.

You can accomplish what you want in a kludgey way (subject to the
above) with manual steps.

1) stop OutgoingRunner
2) if you don't want your post archived, stop ArchRunner
3) send your post to the list
4) if you don't want your post archived, remove it from qfiles/archive/
5) if you stopped ArchRunner, start it.
6) find the post in qfiles/out/ and use something like the script at
<http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/remove_recips> to remove all but you
from the recipient list. (or maybe the fact that it appeared in the
out/ queue is sufficient assuming other messages are being delivered)
7) start OutgoingRunner


Another possibility, assuming that no or very few list members have
their delivery disabled by admin is the following:

1) bin/list_members --nomail=byadmin > nomails
2) get the script at <http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/set_nomail.py>,
install it and run

  bin/withlist -r set_nomail <listname> --allmembers

3) Manually enable delivery to yourself
4) send your test post
5) modify the set_nomail.py script by changing

    if allmembers:
        args = mlist.getMembers()

to

    if allmembers:
        args = mlist.getDeliveryStatusMembers(MemberAdaptor.BYADMIN):


and

        else:
            mlist.setDeliveryStatus(member, MemberAdaptor.BYADMIN)

to

        else:
            mlist.setDeliveryStatus(member, MemberAdaptor.ENABLED)

and run it again as above.

6) If the 'nomails' file above is non-empty, manually disable delivery
to those members.

Assuming I actually wanted to implement a feature to optionally send
posts to say list-owner instead of the elligible list members, how
would you want this to work? Would it be a list setting or triggered
by some magik in the post. If a list setting, what about other posts
that arrive while it is set, or maybe it could be an address such that
if the post gets as far as CalcRecips and the sender of the post is
that address, then deliver it only to that address. If it's magik in
the post, what would it be? Something like an X-Mailman-Send-Only-To:
header might be good, but then I'd get complaints that Lookout (er
Outlook) can't add user defined headers and I'd have to do the whole
pseudo-header-in-the-body number.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan