At 7:47 PM -0400 7/19/01, Patrick Salsbury is rumored to have typed:
You could try a cron job that touches the .etc/rc.lock file every 10-15 minutes until you're ready to roll again. Then just remove the cron job when things are better.
Yipe! That would be a REALLY TERRIBLE IDEA, since each inbound mail (to the list address or the -request address) would spawn a process of flist which would sit there running, patiently waiting for the lockfile to expire...eventually, you would have enough processes backed up to bring the server down to its knees. Since the questioner doesn't have root access, it is assumed crashing the server would _not_ make him popular with whomever DOES have root access on the server. (Please re-read that manual section, particularly the word, "temporarily." It's only designed to hold mail that you want to process temporarily while editing a system file. He wants to avoid processing mail altogether to avoid the viral messages.) Since I don't know how the questioner's system is set up, I can't make any simple suggestions, but one sure-fire way is to simply add a delivering recipe to the top of rc.local.s00...this has the added benefit of leaving sub/unsub alone, and doesn't require root access on the server. Something like: :0 : listholdingfile ..should do nicely. Charlie