[Mailman-Users] Debugging mass invitations using web page interface...

[The Mailing List Server Admin]

Dear Mailman Cognoscenti,

I'm helping one of my list owners send out 5K plus invitations to
students to subscribe to his mailing list.  Our current configuration:

    Mailman v2.1.20
    RHEL v5.11
    Semdmail v8.13.8
    Apache v2.2.3

Since this was the first time doing this, I suggested breaking the
batch input into 3 groups, 50, 500, and the rest.  The 50 went fine,
as did the 500, but the largest batch gave him a generic web server
error:

> Internal Server Error
> 
> The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was
> unable to complete your request.
>
> Please contact the server administrator, root at conundrum.unh.edu and
> inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might
> have done that may have caused the error.
>
> More information about this error may be available in the server
> error log.

I looked at the logs and I couldn't find anything that hinted at what
went wrong.  So I asked the owner to send me the last back and I'd
give it a try.  I wrote a script that removed folks already subscribed
to his list and split the remaining subscribers up into 6 files with a
thousand records each.  I just tried uploading the 1st batch of 1K,
with the following options:

     Subscribe these users now... (*) Invite
     Send welcome message...      (*) No
     Send notifications...        (*) No

And entered a 7 line paragraph explaining the invitation.

I ended up having the same error happen.  Looking at the Mailman logs,
I can't see any difference before or after my submission.  In the
HTTPD logs, I see:

>> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [warn] [client 132.177.215.132] Timeout
>> waiting for output from CGI script
>> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admin, referer:
>> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add

>> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [error] [client 132.177.215.132]
>> Premature end of script headers: admin, referer:
>> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add

So is there an inherent limit to the number of invites that can be
submitted via the web form?

As a work around, how would I do large invites on behalf of the owner
from the command line, including the 'extra text' that is allowed via
the web interface?

-- 
                                   Cordially,
                                   the UNH Mailing List Server Admins
                                   Bill Costa, senior admin
                                   (603) 862-3056