Dada Mail Mailing lists v 2.9.2 - Restoring lists and fixing DBM errors

I always recommend Dada Mail lists for any customers having issues with mailman, Most serious hosting companies, limit the emails send out by the customers per hour. In that cases, if your mailing list has more than 1000 customers, and the limit per hour is set to 300 mails per hour, the extra 700 mails will be bounced.

This is where DaDa Mails comes into picture. Off all the other excellent features, what I like is it's flexibility to configure number of emails to be sent at a certain interval (which can be in secs, mins and hours). Now a days, many other one way mailing list application have such feature, like phplist and so on. Does Mailman have that feature I may have missed ?

Okay anyways the issue arised when a DaDa Mail installation suddenly started showing internal server errors. Checked the log file /usr/local/apache/logs/error_log to see the errors displayed as below,

No DBM package was successfully found or installed at /usr/lib/perl5/5.8.0/AnyDBM_File.pm line 15.
Compilation failed in require at admin.cgi line 21.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at admin.cgi line 21. 

How did that happen ? A working installation suddenly reports that there is no DBM package. Only reason which I could not confirm though was that perl version was 5.8.0, which was not a desired version on a relatively new cPanel server. Now I had to install the DBM packages. AnyDBM_File.pm was reading @ISA = qw(NDBM_File DB_File GDBM_File SDBM_File ODBM_File), and none of the DBM packages was existing on the server.

CPAN didn't had a version in it's tree for perl version 5.8.0, so download and executed the versions for V 5.8.0

wget -rnp http://search.cpan.org/src/JHI/perl-5.8.0/ext/GDBM_File/
wget -rnp http://search.cpan.org/src/JHI/perl-5.8.0/ext/NDBM_File/
wget -rnp http://search.cpan.org/src/JHI/perl-5.8.0/ext/SDBM_File/
wget -rnp http://search.cpan.org/src/JHI/perl-5.8.0/ext/ODBM_File/

Did a make and make install on all of them and internal server error is now gone to be replaced with another error, while trying to login in administration panel of DaDa Mail using the pass which is present in plain text in DADA/Config.pm. Error was as below

[Wed Dec 13 06:09:57 2006] mail.cgi: Dada Mail 2.9.2 warning! List settings db empty!  List setting DB Possibly corrupted! at /DADA/MailingList/Settings/Db.pm line 115.
[Wed Dec 13 06:09:57 2006] mail.cgi: Dada Mail 2.9.2 warning! no listshortname saved in list settings db! List settings DB Possibly corrupted! at /DADA/MailingList/Settings/Db.pm line 118.
[Wed Dec 13 06:09:57 2006] mail.cgi: listshortname in db, 'announcements' does not match saved list shortname: '' at /DADA/MailingList/Settings/Db.pm line 121.
BAD List name "" No such file or directory at /DADA/Template/HTML.pm line 145
[Wed Dec 13 06:09:57 2006] [error] [client 192.168.1.1] Premature end of script headers: /home/example/public_html/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi

Only option left to me was to restore the list. Accessed the restoring list URL for the DaDa mail at http://example.com/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi?f=restore_lists (Replace example.com with your_domain.com). Asked for the admin password and on correct entry , welcomed by Restore screen.. Restore done and all is well :-)