The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

>Is there anyway to halt a distribution in progress?

It's probably a little late to tell you now, but anyway, here goes.

First, halt sympa and postfix (or sendmail or whatever you use).
Now, you can search for outbound messages in the postfix queue under /var and delete them; this stops things that have left sympa but not been passed on.

Now you can kill the message from Sympa.  Odds are it has left the /var spool directories and is now in the bulk table, so you'll need to find it in there and delete it form the database - this could be hard depending on your level of SQL skill and the size of the bulk table.

Once you've done all that, you should be able to start up sympa again.  Don't restart postfix.  If you didn't manage to get the message out of the bulk table correctly, it will continue to distribute, but since postfix is down, it will just end up in the postfix queue, from which you can manually delete it.

Finally, when you're sure all is OK, restart postfix.  At this point new messages will start flowing in again and other messages in the outbound spool that you didnt delete will be delivered.

Steve

Steve Shipway

University of Auckland ITS

UNIX Systems Design Lead

address@concealed

Ph: +64 9 373 7599 ext 86487