On 1 Mar 2005 at 15:37, Kevin Parris wrote:

> One (officially documented) way is to change the subscriber option
> from Digest to NoDigest.  If you as the list owner want to use this,
> it means you have to keep a record of affected subscribers, so you can
> restore their status.  The documentation further says that "set
> listname NoDigest" and "set listname digest" commands may be included
> together, in order, in a single transaction, to have the desired
> effect - which makes the recordkeeping easier (just build yourself a
> file with the commands, and paste it into an email as required).  A
> listowner probably would use the Quiet option also.

But this will only trigger a digest, current as of that moment, to a 
particular subscriber. The digest will continue to build and be sent 
to all other digest subscribers at a later date.

That won't work in the situation I'm facing. We continue to have 
problems with the digest growing well beyond its designated size, and 
we were wondering if there is a way to get listserv to fire off the 
digest to everyone and begin anew. Though I have shared these details 
before, let me offer them again to see if anyone has any ideas.

For several years, listserv correctly fired off the digest when it 
reached its appropriate size (plus whatever overrun the last message 
created -- yes, we're aware that the last message doesn't get 
truncated). All of a sudden, the digest began growing well beyond its 
designated size (1000 lines). Our first effort was to ratchet back 
the size parameter to 500 lines, but that didn't work.

Based on a couple of suggestions on this list, we began taking a look 
at the details. Even though we have set the size parameter to 500 
lines, the digest sometimes fires off at that size and sometimes 
grows well beyond -- going over 5000 lines on a couple of occasions. 
We have looked at the messages at the end of these long digests. They 
are not long enough to create an overflow that size (they have been 
as small as 17 or 18 lines and none are over 50 or 100 lines), 
multipart/alternative doesn't seem to be a factor, there are no large 
attachments which are causing this, and the problem doesn't seem to 
be related to single-line paragraphs.

We continue to search for the mechanism that is causing this. Until 
we find the mechanism, we were wondering if there is a way to 
manually force listserv to fire off the digest and begin building the 
next one.

> My reading of the 1.8d manual is that changing the list header
> digest=yes to digest=no will NOT do what you want - it will instead
> simply discard whatever digest may have accumulated at the time, and
> subscribers set to Digest would not get any more mail from the list
> (until digest=yes is re-established) - the system won't find them and
> change their setting for you.  This may have changed in later
> versions, but we don't have them here yet.

That is our experience, too.

> I will hazard a guess that if the current time is 08:25 and you change
> the 'time' portion of the Digest= header keyword to 09 that might work
> to get a digest cut at the top of the coming hour.  Adapt this example
> as needed for your timezone and waking hours.  And remember to change
> it back if you normally want your digests at midnight (or whenever).

We've tried that, and it doesn't work. I do not know if this is 
because of whatever else is holding up the digest or because the 
change of time doesn't cause the digest to fire. But it doesn't work 
in our case.

Doug