[Mailman-Users] Schedule message posting...

Use the at- or crondemon.


MfG
Detlef Neubauer

I've asked before how to schedule the posting of messages to my list.
Some told me to use cron or tab. The question is, what script/program
should I schedule so I can send the list messages at a desired time. And
how to prevent message posting other than the one ajusted by cron?

Thanks and sorry for the english.
Joao.

I have done this exact thing. I wrote a perl program (could be
anything of course) that runs once a night via cron and checks to see
if there is an email in a not public mail spool. Yes, this could be
abused if somebody "outside" figured out the address. Basically, this
program rips out headers such as To, From, Approve, Subject and the
body (thanks to Mail::Header and Mail::Internet, maybe I should redo
this in Python, just to "keep it in the family" :). Then it creates a
new email and sends it out to the mailing list.
You can't. Basically, anything that goes to the list can go through at
any time. The list I did this for is a "once every 2-3 days" moderated
list. Therefore, nobody else can send to it w/o using the Approve
header, ie. there's no explicitly approved posters. It's a small,
controlled group who can post, so it's not a big deal in this case.

HTH.

cdh

Here's one crazy idea (completely untested, of course): instead of
running the Mailman queue once per minute, run it once per day (say at
3am). This will affect *all* Mailman lists on your system, though, so
if you have some lists that want immediate attention and others that
need to languish until the middle of the night, it won't work.

Most likely, you'll use the "crontab -e" command as the "mailman" user
to change this. Look for a line like
* * * * * /www/python/bin/python -S /home/mailman/cron/qrunner
and change it to
0 3 * * * /www/python/bin/python -S /home/mailman/cron/qrunner
to run at 3:00am every day instead of every minute.
This is probably *NOT* a good idea, but you did ask.

That said, I think putting mail delivery off to the middle of the night
is a waste of your time and effort. If a message doesn't go through due
to congestion, your MTA will defer it and try again later. Let the MTA
do its job.

Greg