The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Susan Neitsch" <address@concealed>]

Greetings!

I have recently taken over maintenance of Sympa at TAMU where the
majority of the lists are set up for professors to send email to
students in their courses. I am currently trying to bring ~7,000 new
lists on-line for the spring semester classes and am running into a few
problems that I am not certain how to address.

Due to the large number of courses, scripts are used to create and
populate the list directories. The lists are set up with instructors as
list editors and students as subscribers. Subscriber emails are obtained
from an external database containing the roster/student information
using an sql_query.

My initial script set up a list directory in sympa/expl containing
config and message.footer files for courses. When testing this, emails
sent to courses produced the following messages in the local1.log:

Jan 11 16:23:20: Processing message for agls125502-2005a with priority
5, <address@concealed>\n
Jan 11 16:23:20: Key b330a3ad370901fe1993e19eec2d5f36 for list
agls125502-2005a from address@concealed sent to editors,
/data/sympa/spool/msg/agls125502-2005a.1105482196.9818
Jan 11 16:24:56: Parsing: DISTRIBUTE agls125502-2005a
b330a3ad370901fe1993e19eec2d5f36
Jan 11 16:24:57: No subscriber in list agls125502-2005a
Jan 11 16:24:57: Message for agls125502-2005a from address@concealed
accepted but all subscribers use digest,nomail or summary
Jan 11 16:24:57: Message for agls125502-2005a from address@concealed
accepted (1 seconds, 0 sessions), size=0
Jan 11 16:24:57: DISTRIBUTE agls125502-2005a
b330a3ad370901fe1993e19eec2d5f36 from address@concealed accepted (1
seconds)

I tested the query for this list and it extracted 40 email addresses
from the Oracle database. While processing this message, Sympa did go to
the Oracle database and obtain the emails and it also created a
subscribers.db file in the list directory and wrote the email addresses
in the db file, but it did not send the email to the subscribers.

I was able to replicate this sequence of events for a course extracting
4 emails and eliminated the problem when I modified my list creation
script to also copy a stats file and an empty subscribers.db file to
each list directory. The two lines with "no subscriber in list . . ."
and  ". . . all subscribers use digest, nomail or summary" were gone and
the mail log showed that the email was sent to the 4 people.

However, when I had the professor resubmit his email to his course list
after I regenerated the list with these modifications, the error is
still present:

Jan 12 14:29:32: Processing message for agls125502-2005a with priority
5, <address@concealed>\n
Jan 12 14:29:33: Key 56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8 for list
agls125502-2005a from address@concealed sent to editors,
/data/sympa/spool/msg/agls125502-2005a.1105561767.25553
Jan 12 14:30:58: Parsing: DISTRIBUTE agls125502-2005a
56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8
Jan 12 14:30:59: No subscriber for sending msg in list
agls125502-2005a
Jan 12 14:30:59: Message for agls125502-2005a from address@concealed
accepted but all subscribers use digest,nomail or summary
Jan 12 14:30:59: Message for agls125502-2005a from address@concealed
accepted (1 seconds, 0 sessions), size=0
Jan 12 14:30:59: DISTRIBUTE agls125502-2005a
56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8 from address@concealed accepted (1
seconds)
Jan 12 14:31:59: Parsing: DISTRIBUTE agls125502-2005a
56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8
Jan 12 14:31:59: Cannot open message file
/data/sympa/spool/moderation/agls125502-2005a_56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8.distribute
: No such file or directory
Jan 12 14:31:59: Unable to create Message object
/data/sympa/spool/moderation/agls125502-2005a_56d84f95f4008b5e0fe033955bef93f8.distribute

The mail log confirmed that the email was not distributed. This time I
think Sympa also had problems reading the message, although it was
present in full in the list archive directory. Unlike the previous
scenario where Sympa created a subscribers.db file with the emails even
though it didn't send, this time the empty subscribers.db file remained
unmodified.

I am just beginning to get into the code and would appreciate any
insights into the significance of these log messages and what I should
do next.

Regards.
Susan Neitsch