[MM3-users] pending subscriptions lost?

hi,

after mark has helped me at the end of january to find users that were not attached to any mailing list (indicating people who pressed the wrong button when trying tosign up), we sent out a 2nd mass mail to our target audience to ask them to subscribe again.

we are now getting feedback from people, who say that they are unable to sign up, with mailman3 telling them:

Subscription request already pending

this is somewhat bad as:

• at least some of the users (who reported the problem) tried to subscribe 2 months ago (2022-01-04) - if they did not confirm their email back then, i'm pretty sure that this email has been lost by now
• my /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg has "pending_request_life: 3d"
• i (as administrator) do not see any "pending subscriptions" (the list is setup with a simple "Confirm" subscription policy
• i (as administrator) do not find any mention of the user's email address anywhere either in postorious webinterface of the list, nor in the django
• in the sql-dump (it's been a while since i worked with postgres on a higher level) i do see the user's email in the workflowstate, address and pendedkeyvalue tables.

the installation is (still) mailman_3.2.1-1 on a Debian/buster system (using the Debian/buster packages for mailman3)

i wonder:

• why are the pending subscriptions not expired? (i guess they should have expired after 3 days)
• why can't people re-subscribe while there's a subscription pending (e.g. if the confirmation mail got lost)?
• how can i list all pending subscriptions (for a given mailinglist)?
• how can i resolve the situtation (e.g. send out another reminder; manually expire the pendings; manually confirm the pendings,...)

gfmdsd IOhannes