On Tue, 28 Sep 1999, Lisa Bohm wrote:
> Does anyone have a simple, quick method for temprarily deactivating a
> list? Would simply commenting out the mailinglist.alias lines for
> that particular list work, or is there something else?
It depends on what you want to happen to particular sorts of activites
(posting and administriva).
First lets assume that you want to stop postings, but will still allow
people to subscribe and unsubscribe and other usual admin stuff.
Now the question is what to you want to happen when people post during the
period of suspension?
If you simply remove the alias then people posting will get bounces that
say
unknown user listname
If you are running exim, http://www.exim.org/ , you can replace the alias
with
listname: :fail: Mailing list temporarily disabled, try again after ...
That way, instead of getting "unknown user" as the error reported in the
bounce, they'll get
Mailing list temporarily disabled, try again after ...
I assume that this is possible in sendmail and other MTAs, but that's how
to do it with exim.
A third option is to use the majordomo NEWLIST mechanism. I've never used
it, but look for NEWLIST in the majordomo directory and see whether that
seems appropriate. (It's designed so that majordomo will hold posts for a
while, normally when a list is first started.)
If you want to also prevent people subscribing or unsubscribing, probably
the best thing to do is to make all activity require approval, that is use
"closed" for as many policies as possible. If you really wanted to
shutdown, you could rename the list file, but then people will just get
funny errors for majordomo and will think that the list has gone away.
-j
--
Jeffrey Goldberg +44 (0)1234 750 111 x 2826
Cranfield Computer Centre FAX 751 814
J.Goldberg@Cranfield.ac.uk http://WWW.Cranfield.ac.uk/public/cc/cc047/
Relativism is the triumph of authority over truth, convention over justice.
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