Unsubscribed users continue to receive reminders

[Swelljoe]

I have two machines, one running 2.1.6 (with no
patches, as provided by list.org) and another running
2.1.5 (as provided by Fedora Core 4), and both exhibit
a very annoying problem when password reminders are
enabled. Users who have successfully unsubscribed
continue to receive reminders...possibly forever, but
at least two monthly reminder cycles is confirmed. I
don't know if it always happens, but on a system with
about 1000 subscribers across all lists, I get about
two or three complaints about this every month, so it
seems likely.

A search for the user in the membership management list
confirms they do not exist as a subscriber. grepping
for the address in the Mailman directories turns up the
address twice in the lists/list-name/config.db file.

[http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=1345599&group_id=103&atid=100103]

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

I know your experience seems to contradict this, but
cron/mailpasswds only mails to current subscribers.

Did you really mean lists/list-name/config.db file? Since
Mailman 2.1, the list config/membership is in
lists/list-name/config.pck. If you have config.db files,
they shouldn't be coming into play at all in Mailman 2.1.x
(except in initial upgrade when they are used to create the
config.pck).

Are the users possibly subscribed to some old, inactive
version of the list?

In any case, I don't think that a user who is not a current
subscriber to 'list@domain' can receive a password reminder
for 'list@domain' from 'mailman-owner@domain'.

[Swelljoe (swelljoe)]

Both systems have been upgraded from older versions of
Mailman, and they have both config.db and config.pck files.
 Only the config.db file contains the email addresses in
question.

There is no "old, inactive version" of any of the lists, but
perhaps the upgrades to the 2.1 series mailman did not go as
well as I'd assumed (the upgrades happened a very long time
ago now--users have just recently started becoming abusive
about the monthly barrage of membership reminders, so I
needed to do something about it).

So, I guess I just need to figure out how to make it stop
sending reminders to users in the config.db (strange...I
don't get two reminders, even though I'm in both the old and
new version of the list). If I have a config.pck file, does
that mean I can safely remove the config.db file? I'm
unable to find any cronjob configuration that runs this
program, I assume it is something that the mailman qrunner
server triggers?

[Mark Sapiro (msapiro)]

"If I have a config.pck file, does that mean I can safely
remove the config.db file?"

Yes. Do remove it. I doubt it will fix anything, but if it
does, I think it would have to be because there is still
residue of a pre 2.1 Mailman somewhere on the system.

"I'm unable to find any cronjob configuration that runs this
program, I assume it is something that the mailman qrunner
server triggers?"

No. It is not triggered by a qrunner. The actual script is
cron/mailpasswds. The standard crontab to be installed is
cron/crontab.in. See "man cron" for various places it might
be installed.

Installation from source requires manual installation of the
crontab, e.g., as described in
<http://www.list.org/mailman-install/node41.html> which
procedure installs it usually in /var/spool/cron/mailman
from where it can be listed with the same command described
in the above reference with a '-l' option instead of the
crontab.in name.

The Fedora rpm may install a slightly different crontab
(with a user field) in /etc/cron.d/mailman.

[Ron Fial (ron-2)]

Make sure you don't have a crontab you don't know about. Look for the file /etc/cron.d/mailman
If it is there, it is running your archive, digest, reminder etc. tasks. This 'hidden' crontab caused
a lot of 'duplicate membership reminders' problems for me, because it does not show up with
crontab -l -u mailman after installing mailman. So I ran crontab -e -u mailman, manually entered a
crontab for the mailman user, and wound up with duplicate crontabs, and duplicate membership reminders.