On 2/20/26 16:35, John Price via Mailman-users wrote:

I'm having trouble getting digests to work. When I try to manually send one, it does nothing, and then the digest gets deleted (I guess?).

If the mailman digests command is run without a --send or --periodic option, it won't send any digests. See mailman digests --help.

Messages for a list's digest are accumulated in a mailbox at Mailman's var/lists/<list_id>/digest.mmdf.

They are sent when the mailbox reaches the size set as the list's digest_size_threshold and if the list's digest_send_periodic is True, when the mailman digests --periodic command is run - normally run daily via cron,. See <https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html#setup-cron-jobs>.

I would love it if the documentation explained a bit more how the process works. How are the files gathered? What file can I backup and later restore if I'm debugging it?

One of the handlers run in the posting pipeline is to_digest which adds the message to the list's digest.mmdf file and checks if a digest should be sent based on size.

Also, how are the digest issue and volume numbers work? Is there any way to control that? Since I've been running digests for decades, can I set the volume and issue to what I want so that the numbering continues from where the other installation left off?

The issue number is incremented with each digest At intervals determined by the list's digest_volume_frequency The issue number is reset and the volume number is incremented. The volume can also be incremented and the issue reset by running mailman digests with the --bump option The current volume number is the list's volume attribute and the next issue number is the list's next_digest_number attribute. These can be manipulated viamailman shell` or by direct manipulation of the list's entry in the mailinglist table in the database.

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