#pragma page-filename DOC/versions/4030620
== 4.74. How do I manually remove held messages from the command-line? ==

Note: Mailman's bin/ directory is in the configured PREFIX directory and the data/ directory is in VAR_PREFIX. The following assumes both of these are ~mailman - YMMV.

Held messages are stored in ~mailman/data as heldmsg-<listname>-<#>.pck. There is a command line tool to remove held messages and clean up the associated entries in the list's request.pck file. If the number of held messages is relatively small, the heldmsg*.pck files can simply be removed, but if the number is large enough to cause problems in the admindb web interface, the problems will persist after simply removing the heldmsg*.pck files. Therefore, it is best to use the command line tool ~mailman/bin/discard for this purpose.

{{{
 $ cd ~mailman
 $ bin/discard data/heldmsg-<listname>-*
}}}

However, for very large collections, once the shell is done expanding the wildcard this may exceed the limits of how many characters can be allowed in a single command-line. In this case, you could use something like this:

{{{
 $ cd ~mailman
 $ find data -name heldmsg-<listname>-\* -print | xargs bin/discard
}}}

Also note [[http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin|http://heim.ifi.uio.no/kjetilho/hacks/#listadmin]] command line fontend to web backend.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many [[../Frequently Asked Questions|Frequently Asked Questions]].