[Mailman-Users] Command-line to the rescue?

[Richard]

Hi All,

For those who don't care about background, skip ahead to "DISCARD" below!

This past fall / winter, a series of old-hardware-finally-died events 
cascaded into a bloody mess with our network and - never mind the 
underlying details - I ended up with one remaining network problem I have 
yet to solve, and in the mean time, it's making my administration of 
Mailman lists a royal pain in the butt.

In short, there's a bug in the firewall / routing software on my firewall 
gateway box which is preventing me from getting to my own internal 
systems' external IP addresses via a web browser. Other people can get to 
those systems using their normal IP addresses (from the outside), but I 
can't (from the inside). However, the external systems don't administer 
Mailman anyway - two servers do pass-through to an internal server that 
does it on the same system that does email processing. SO, I _can_ get to 
that system via internal IP, and if I set up my /etc/hosts file correctly, 
the virtual domain hosting part works fine, too, so I have access to 
mailman administration from the inside, sort of!

HOWEVER, that system paints an external domain name, so all the pass 
through works through the external servers. This means the URLs are wrong 
for internal access and therefore if you try it SOME administration tasks 
fail because it tries to hit features using the external naming - which 
presently isn't working from the inside due to the routing problem! Doah! 
...ONE of those key administration tasks that doesn't work is the 
management of "pending moderator requests."

And, using the mail reply option isn't sufficient because we no longer 
have all the original administrator emails to reply to!

DISCARD

So... /usr/lib/mailman/bin/discard to the rescue?

All 'discard -h' says is:

Discard held messages.

Usage:
     discard [options] file ...

Options:
     --help / -h
         Print this help message and exit.

     --quiet / -q
         Don't print status messages.

Um... Obvious question: What goes in the file?

I'd also have expected it to present me with an option to specify which 
list? A "from" email address? And what if I want to accept or reject 
instead of discard?

Is there a different utility I should be looking at?

BTW, it's mailman 2.1.14-12, and I'm pretty sure it's the youngest version 
that will run on that particular box.

Thanks,
Richard