Not fatal but hundreds of emails per day. I copies the crontabs from the documentation; Here is the crontab I have:

 * * * * *          /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs minutely
 0,15,30,45 * * * * /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs quarter_hourly
 @hourly            /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs hourly
 @daily             /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs daily
 @weekly            /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs weekly
 @monthly           /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs monthly
 @yearly            /opt/mailman/venv/bin/mailman-web runjobs yearly

I installed mailman-web 0.0.10 and that cleared up half the problem. The django-admin problem still exists. Do I need to create the directory /var/run/mailman3-web or should there be a different path specified somewhere?

dap1--- via Mailman-users writes:

Not fatal but hundreds of emails per day. I copies the crontabs from the documentation; Here is the crontab I have:

I'm not sure if cron is the problem of "hundreds of emails", but if you check the jobs in site-packages/hyperkitty/jobs/*.py, you'll find that the active jobs run hourly, at the most frequently. (grep for "when"). So if your HyperKitty is like mine, you could save like 1500 mails/day by commenting out the lines for minutely, quarter_hourly, and weekly.

You may also be able to change the configuration of cron so that only processes that return a failure (non-zero) status send email.

Steve

-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan

On 11/5/25 09:47, dap1--- via Mailman-users wrote:

Thanks. I just decided to send the cron job output to /dev/null.

I think you need to find the cause of those errors rather than ignoring them and potentially more serious ones.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

Stephen: My bad, typos. I'n not sure what to change or to what:

empty_threads.py: when = "monthly" new_lists_from_mailman.py: when = "hourly" orphan_emails.py:This can happen if HK receives the reply before the original message (when a orphan_emails.py: when = "daily" recent_threads_cache.py: when = "daily" sync_mailman.py: when = "daily" thread_order_depth.py: when = "yearly" thread_starting_email.py: help = "Find the starting email when it is missing" thread_starting_email.py: when = "hourly" update_and_clean_index.py: when = "monthly" update_index.py: when = "hourly"

On 11/5/25 10:22, dap1--- via Mailman-users wrote:

Mark: I hope to do that but I am getting killed with emails in the mean time. I'm guessing all these issues stem from the incorrect location of django. How do I fix that?

See https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/... and https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/...

I find it very difficult to help you when you don't report the results of things I suggest

Stephen: I can't find anything. Here is /opt/mailman/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/hyperkitty/jobs:

empty_threads.py __pycache__ thread_starting_email.py __init__.py recent_threads_cache.py update_and_clean_index.py new_lists_from_mailman.py sync_mailman.py update_index.py orphan_emails.py thread_order_depth.py

The problem isn't with your virtualenv install. It is with some left over crontab from a prior attempt to install Ubuntu packages.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

On 11/5/25 11:17, dap1--- via Mailman-users wrote:

Sorry Mark:

These hundreds of emails are distracting and I have too many irons in the fire between you and Stephen. That is not a criticism as I greatly appreciate the help from both of you. Just that I'm having difficulty keeping up with you both.

> sudo grep -r '/usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py' /etc/cron* /var/spool/cron
> 
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:* *     * * *      www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.minutely /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs minutely
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:2,17,32,47 * * * * www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.quarter_hourly /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs quarter_hourly
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:@hourly            www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.hourly /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs hourly
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:@daily             www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.daily /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs daily
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:@weekly            www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.weekly /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs weekly
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:@monthly           www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.monthly /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs monthly
> /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web:@yearly            www-data     [ -f /usr/bin/django-admin ] && flock -n /v
> ar/run/mailman3-web/cron.yearly /usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py runjobs yearly

This is not the crontab you reported at https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/message/...

That one is probably /var/spool/cron/crontabs/mailman and wouldn't show here because it doesn't contain '/usr/share/mailman3-web/manage.py'.

So the system crontab at /etc/cron.d/mailman3-web is your issue and should be removed. That will get rid of the cron failure emails.

This was a fresh install of Ubuntu server so the only packages installed so far are dump/restore, Ubuntu-desktop, MySQL, Postfix, fetchmail and mailman3. Apache2 comes preinstalled with Ubuntu but there may be others of which I am currently unaware. As far as I know the only other crontab is for root where I have the backup jobs scheduled.

0 3 * * 0 /usr/local/sbin/sysbackup

Then the remaining question is how did that crontab get there in the system crontabs. The only way I know it could have gotten there if you didn't manually create it is via installation of Ubuntu Mailman packages.

I think you probably also have a django-admin and perhaps other things in /usr/bin/ and also a /usr/share/mailman-web/ directory which you don't want or need.

I suggest you do

sudo apt list mailman3 mailman3-web mailman3-full mailman3-doc

and see which of those unwanted packages are installed, and if any, sudo apt remove them.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

When I said mailman3 I did not mean it was installed outside of venv. My bad. Sorry.

Odd, this is the output but none of those packages (if that is what they are) exist to be removed.

mailman3-doc/noble-updates 3.3.8-3.1ubuntu0.1 all mailman3-full/noble-updates 3.3.8-3.1ubuntu0.1 all mailman3-web/noble,now 0+20200530-2.1 all [residual-config] mailman3/noble-updates 3.3.8-3.1ubuntu0.1 all

I've removed that cron file.

Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree... Done Reading state information... Done Package 'mailman3' is not installed, so not removed 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 5 not upgraded.

dap1--- via Mailman-users writes:

Mark: I hope to do that but I am getting killed with emails in the mean time. I'm guessing all these issues stem from the incorrect location of django. How do I fix that?

Stephen: I can't find anything. Here is /opt/mailman/venv/lib/python3.12/site-packages/hyperkitty/jobs:

Do you know what "grep" is? You need to "grep when *.py" in that directory to get the settings for frequency. You most likely will find hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly and the other lines can be commented out. But you should check before disabling the cron jobs, some are necessary for functionality (indexing the archive) and others are cleanups of cruft that could eventually impact functionality.

But if the minutely and quarter_hourly jobs are reporting errors, you need to find out why, because as Mark points out that probably means you have garbage left over from a previous misconfiguration, either Ubuntu's package or while you were fiddling around to get to where you are now. And that garbage is quite possibly the cause of the current failures.

-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan