We recently switched over the GNOME mailing lists to Mailman, and it was a quite easy transition. So far, everything is working nicely.

The most common problem problem that people seem to have is password management. Quite a few people try to unsubscribe without a password, and when they get an error message back, resort to mailing the mail admin address and asking the owner to do it.

And in fact, none of the mail help text makes any reference about how one can find out ones password. I could add a pointer to the how to do it via the web in the help text, but it seems simpler to simply mail out a password reminder when a users command fails because they

a) didn't include a password b) included the wrong password

(The password could even be put directly into the response if the address that the request comes from is the same as the address the command pertained to.)

However, since this idea seems pretty obvious to me, and yet it isn't already, I thought I would ask if there is any reason I'm missing why it should not be done, before I went off and did it.

The other password related modification I was thinking of doing locally here is a little bit more radical - making it so that all passwords for a given email address are interchangable. Quite a few people are subscribed to 10-15 different gnome.org mailing lists, and when they were moved over, they were assigned a different password for each list.

(If I had planned it better, I would have written a custom add_members script so that people, at least initially, would have the same password for each list.)

Of course, IMO, the best thing would be to have just a single password per user, but making the passwords for each list interchangeable is a good step in the right direction.

Again, I'd like opinions about whether this is just a bad idea or not.

Regards, Owen