On 12/2/2008 9:14 AM, Birchler, Gary wrote:
> We have a list that has started to be held from delivery for some reason.
 > Is there some way we can prevent this from happening? It has worked fine
 > for a long time and now for the past ten days it has been held on the
 > listserv server instead of being delivered to the subscribers of the list.

The two most likely explanations are:

1. Someone with administrative authority over the list - perhaps the list owner,
    perhaps the site administrator - manually placed the list on hold.  If the
    list was not put on hold by an owner, check with the site administrator;
    there may be a problem of some sort that needs to be addressed.

2. The list is configured with a 'Daily-Threshold=' statement which defines the
    maximum allowable postings per day.  If there is no 'Daily-Threshold='
    statement in the list header, LISTSERV uses the default value of 50.  When
    the threshold is exceeded, the list is automatically placed on hold by the
    server.  The hold is not automatically released by the server, because the
    server has no way to accurately and programmatically determine whether the
    threshold was exceeded because a hot topic generated a lot of postings, or
    because something somewhere caused a mail loop.  When a list is placed on
    hold in this manner, a message is sent to the non-quiet owners.  If you
    are one of the non-quiet owners, you should have received that message.

After you determine how and why the list was placed on hold, and address any
issues that need to be addressed, you can release the hold using the 'free
listname' command, where 'listname' is the name of your list.

If the list was placed on hold automatically because the daily posting limit was
exceeded, and the number of held messages exceeds the daily posting limit, the
list will be placed on hold as soon as the server processes enough messages to
exceed the posting limit.  You may need to issue the 'free' command more than
once to clear the backlog in the queue.

If the list was placed on hold automatically because the daily posting limit was
exceeded, and you anticipate that this will be a recurring event, you may want
to consider increasing the value specified on the 'Daily-Threshold=' statement.
You may want to check with the site administrator before you make this change,
to be sure that the change will not violate any local policies, or cause
problems for other lists hosted on the same server.

--
Paul Russell, Senior Systems Administrator
OIT Messaging Services Team
University of Notre Dame
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