The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Aumont <address@concealed>]

Struan Donald wrote:

> The first is that in some ways I'd find it more convient if I could
> get sympa to send a file at certain times rather than have to email
> sympa to distribute the newsletter. Now I understand that as newletter
> distribution is not the primary function of sympa this is not liable
> to be possible but if it is I'd like to know how.
Yes distributing a newsletter is one of the primary sympa's feature.
No, sympa will not start at predefine time to distribute a message, it
only check his spool (not really true for the digest which is sent
periodicaly). You should try to prepare and mail the newsletter to sympa
by crontab ?
> 
> Secondly, what happens if something causes sympa to fail half way
> through processing a list. i.e what happens if not all the subscribers
> names gets passed to sendmail. There seems to be no mechanism for me
> to say "start sending again at the point it failed". As all the
> processing of recipients seems to take place in memory (unless i've
> misunderstood the code :) I can't see any way of doing this.
> 
Hum !!!! Sympa should never die ! That's the first question to solve.
How to restart a distribution process ?  Sympa delete a message
from his spool when distribution is finished. So restarting sympa will
distribute the message twice to the beginning of the list. 
It is not easy to prevent this ?

-allways run sympa with the -m option sone you will have logs of all
 sendmail call

-when you sever crash (Sympa can't crash unless your unix crash :), do not
 restart sympa. 

-edit the list configuration file and choose :
 user_data_source file
 
-prepare a file ~sympa/expl/<list>/subscribers that contain a copy of 
 the last subscribers.db.dump. Remove all subscribers from the begining
 to the first user which as received a mail from the list (check logs)

-block sympa robot (set the robot priority parameter to z) and wwsympa
 to prevent subscrition in the during the distribution process.
 
-start sympa finish the distribution

-stop sympa, restore the list config and robot priority, start again sympa.


We have done it tree years ago because of to large maxsmtp parameter which
cause a panic on the unix system (to many open file, not enouf memory, ...)


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Serge Aumont        Comité Réseaux des Universités
                     Campus Beaulieu 
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