[Mailman-Users] remove messages from Mailman queue

[Mark Sapiro]

me at electronico.nc wrote:
>
>One email address was mistyped in a list and I receive tons of emails a 
>day about :
>Postfix SMTP server: errors from localhost[127.0.0.1]
>
>I went to Mailman queue and here is the queue contents :
>
[...]
>/var/lib/mailman/qfiles/bad:
>total 16K
>drwxrws---  2 list list 4,0K 2010-02-09 12:00 .
>drwxrwsr-x 12 list list 4,0K 2010-02-09 12:00 ..
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 4,6K 2010-02-09 12:00 
>1265677201.538301+ff2998155195d0f6d06604e67777ba8ccfff2cf2.psv
>
[...]
>/var/lib/mailman/qfiles/retry:
>total 180K
>drwxrws---  2 list list 4,0K 2010-02-17 08:35 .
>drwxrwsr-x 12 list list 4,0K 2010-02-09 12:00 ..
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 4,8K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1265961379.78371+f52f95dafd795b376b6f236266a30656762e9312.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 4,8K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1265962377.1492419+ab429d4da967b4e5d73a49b9ad9c15da63938e4d.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 3,8K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1265963302.2198579+e23759d849358c41e5cb65734c68113e03940d53.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list  53K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1266005255.3434069+05885e1413d12056b100ec76122a9ed15fe52aee.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 5,5K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1266181576.168088+374f21f5a8cbeb5d1b634327d8e37f145c3aca06.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list  74K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1266183850.9198849+cae961d9f131124aec881c1aca55e7a2405d9f7c.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 5,1K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1266192566.7376809+2c441fed9eccdede5580771ad81d47a2870c6a66.pck
>-rw-rw----  1 list list 1,5K 2010-02-17 08:35 
>1266209411.1881809+530cd317167b0a37421ef71f51fd739dbaa4e58f.pck
[...]
>
>My question is : can I safely manually remove (rm) files from qfiles/bad 
>and qfiles/retry or is there another way to proceed ?



The entry in qfiles/bad is something else. It is either an unparseable
message (likely spam) or a message that was supposed to be shunted but
for which shunting failed for some reason. You may be able to see the
message content with either bin/show_qfiles or bin/dumpdb pointed at
the file. In any case, there should be an entry in Mailman's error log
with timestamp "Feb  8 17:00:01" or possibly "2010-02-09 12:00" and
saying either "Skipping and preserving unparseable message:
1265677201.538301+ff2998155195d0f6d06604e67777ba8ccfff2cf2" or
"SHUNTING FAILED, preserving original entry:
1265677201.538301+ff2998155195d0f6d06604e67777ba8ccfff2cf2". In the
latter case, this may be preceded by another exception and traceback,
but it is more likely the former.

This message is no longer being processed by Mailman and can be rm'd if
you wish, although if the cull_bad_shunt cron job is running, the file
should be automatically removed the first time cull_bad_shunt runs
after it is 7 days old.

The messages in qfiles/retry can also just be rm'd. You can see the
undelivered recipients (probably just the one bad one) by running
bin/dumpdb against the files. If the message still has valid
recipients, as well as the invalid one(s), see
<http://www.msapiro.net/scripts/remove_recips>.

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