Mailman 3 January 2015 - Mailman-Users

Upgrade instructions
by G. Armour Van Horn June 7, 2025

June 7, 2025

I have a couple of Mailman lists on a server happily running 2.1.9 but I am also a moderator on a very active list that's running on 2.1.12. I do not host this list, just volunteer because I have some experience with Mailman. That list has started to get some significant bounces due to the DMARC issue that isn't addressed in this older version. The host intends to upgrade so that we can address that but they report that they haven't been able to make archives searchable in their experimentation with 2.1.16. I don't know if that search function is part of the more recent versions of Pipermail or if they've installed something else. I'm nervous about attempting to upgrade, given the paucity of documentation for that, particularly the fact that it tells me to use the same configuration options I used for the current install and I haven't a clue what those might have been. If I could find some more robust upgrade docs I'd like to try the upgrade in case I could contribute anything to the problem with the large list. Today I had to clear the bounce flags on 47 members. Not all that hard, but tedious. Van -- ---------------------------------------------------------- Sign up now for Quotes of the Day, a handful of quotations on a theme delivered every morning. Enlightenment! Daily, for free! http://www.qotd.org/subscribe.html For photography, web design, hosting, and maintenance, visit Van's home page: http://www.domainvanhorn.com/van/ -----------------------------------------------------------

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Editing Mailman's text files
by Pete Bell May 8, 2024

May 8, 2024

Hi. I'm a new member of this group but have been running an email list with Mailman for a long time. I am now setting a list up again and want to give a "look and feel" to the list which has more branding of my user group as a whole, and less of a Mailman-feel. I seem to remember that besides editing the public HTML pages, it is possible to edit the text files which Mailman automatically sends out for certain needs (such as 'approve.txt', 'adminsubscribeack.txt', 'invite.txt', and so on). A. Is this still the case? B. If so, where can I find them? (in case they've changed from the ones I have from long ago). C. Where do they need putting, so that Mailman can use them again? It's important that I should tell you that Mailman on my webhosts servers is a "server-wide" installation, and I don't get to edit anything which other clients to their servers need. This would be only for my own use, and as such I need to know where these files go in my own webspace, and how to get Mailman to use them instead of the default ones. I should also say that I have done this before, so unless the facility to do this has been ditched in recent years, I *should* still be able to do it ! Does Mailman perhaps look for these files somewhere in my webspace (which I have to give a specific name), and if it doesn't find them it goes on to find its default versions of these files? Thanks in advance for your help. Pete Bell, UK

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Running two list with same email prefix
by Andrea Cappelli Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Hi all, I'm running a mail server with Debian Lenny, MTA is Postfix and i will use postfix-to-mailma.py script to run list I would set up Mailman for running mailing list with same email prefix on different domains, obvious with different list names For example we have ml.domain1.com and ml.domain2.net, i would like to have LISTADDRESS LISTNAME tech(a)ml.domain1.com tech-ml.domain1.com tech(a)ml.domain.2.net tech-ml.domain2.net In this way i can have the same address on differente domains and Mailman (my version is 2.1.11) can distinguish between lists because the list name is different. The list name will be also used to access web interface, so we have http://ml.domain1.com/mailman/admin/tech-ml.domain1.com http://ml.domain2.net/mailman/admin/tech-ml.domain2.net Is possible to accomplish this task? Any idea?

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Hide list address?
by Ricardo Kleemann Nov. 17, 2023

Nov. 17, 2023

Hi, Is there any way to configure Mailman such that, for an announcement-only type list, when a message is sent to the list, the To: shows the member's address, rather than the list address? Some list software allows the ability to hide the list address itself, so that address is not advertised. I couldn't find any configuration specific to that.

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Add "sender's name/email" to BODY of mail as header?
by Mal Feb. 17, 2021

Feb. 17, 2021

I want all mails sent to the list to come from the list's email address... But, in this case, if the user forgets to sign their name at the bottom of their mail body, effectively the mail to the list is anonymous...! Is there a way to add the user name (or email address) to the top of each mail so that the mails have the name of the sender, while the mail itself comes from the list address? I have looked high and low for an answer, but noone seems to have the solution. Thank you! Mal

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Mailman CGI Error-Group mismatch error
by Wang, Mary Y Sept. 10, 2020

Sept. 10, 2020

Hi, I received the following error this morning. So I rerun configure again with the following command: ./configure --with-cgi-id=apache --prefix=/var/mailman. I'm still getting the same error. Is there any place that I can look for so that I can debug this problem better? Perhaps, looking at the config history file or something. Any other places that I can check the cause of this error? "Mailman CGI error!!! The Mailman CGI wrapper encountered a fatal error. This entry is being stored in your syslog: Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the CGI wrapper script to be executed as group "nobody", but the system's web server executed the CGI script as group "apache". Try tweaking the web server to run the script as group "nobody", or re-run configure, providing the command line option `--with-cgi-gid=apache'." Thanks Mary

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Mailman 2.1.18-1 not respecting add_virtualhost
by Chris Miller July 3, 2015

July 3, 2015

Hello, we recently updated our (vhost patched) Mailman installation from 2.1.14 to 2.1.18-1 (https://launchpad.net/~msapiro) in order to workaround Yahoo's recent change to their SPF policy that this version addresses. Virtual mailing list hosting worked fine up until this upgrade. Here is an example of our mm_cfg.py : VIRTUAL_HOSTS.clear() DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'list.ourdomain.com' DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'list.ourdomain.com' DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/mailman/' VIRTUAL_HOST_OVERVIEW = On add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST) add_virtualhost('list.customerdomain.com', 'customerdomain.com') If we change the default values above and run the below command, the available mailing lists move from the old default to the new. bin/withlist -l -a -r fix_url -- All add_virtualhost configuration lines are ignored. Since withlist is able to read the changes in our mm_cfg.py, this does not strike me as an issue with our configure options which were limited : ./configure --prefix=/usr/lib/mailman --with-var-prefix=/var/lib/mailman --with-cgi-gid=apache I am unaware of a method we can use to further debug this, such as a command that would effectively dump out Mailman's configuration options, thus validating if it is even reading the add_virtualhost configuration lines. -- Regards, Chris Chris Miller President - Rocket Scientist ScratchSpace Inc. (831) 621-7928 http://www.scratchspace.com

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Announcing the new wiki.list.org
by Barry Warsaw March 3, 2015

March 3, 2015

I am very happy to announce our new wiki! If you go to wiki.list.org you will see our shiny new Moin-based wiki. We are retiring the old Confluence-based wiki at the end of February. Until then, you can access it at old-wiki.list.org. Our very huge thanks go to Paul Boddie who did the amazing conversion work, almost single-handedly reverse engineering the Confluence dump through several iterations. Of course, our thanks also go to John Viega, owner of the list.org domain and Mailman's inventor for helping us get the DNS flipped over. Thanks too to everyone who gave feedback on the new wiki, contributed to the old wiki, and continue to help edit this important resource for the Mailman community. Our thanks also go to the Python Software Foundation and the PSF infrastructure team for providing us with the virtual machine hosting our new wiki. If you had write access to the old wiki and want it again for the new wiki, you will have to re-submit a request to mailman-cabal(a)python.org. Please be sure to register with wiki.list.org and provide us with your user name. With this conversion, I am happy to say that GNU Mailman is finally fully hosted on free software. While we appreciate the years of service donated to us by Atlassian and Contegix, it's important that we set an example by utilizing an entirely free software stack for our development and outreach. The wiki was our last remaining non-free bits. Let the gardening begin! Cheers, -Barry (On behalf of the GNU Mailman steering committee) P.S. We are working on the SSL certificate for the new wiki. Stay tuned.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Is there tool convert archived files/directories into a mbox file?
by Mark Sapiro March 2, 2015

March 2, 2015

On 05/10/2013 06:35 AM, Xie, Wei wrote: > > Here we have one customer to request migrating all old archived files of > mailing list ‘kinejapan’ under directory > /usr/local/mailman/archives/private/kinejapan prior to 2009 (as attached > file) to Yale university. Yale university IT guys needs us to create a > mbox file for these old archived file to be easy for them to run > command ‘archdo migration. > > > > I check there is no file kinejapan.mbox under directory > /usr/local/mailman/archives/private/kinejapan.mbox to match these old > archived files as attached. This mailing list was maintained by our > pre-mailman admin, who passed away 2011, so I do not know why the mbox > file was missing. If ARCHIVE_TO_MBOX is set to 0 in mm_cfg.py, Mailman will not create/update LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox files. > Do you know whether there is a tool/method to convert these old archived > files/directories as attached into a mbox file? Lots of information is lost if there is no .mbox file. You can do as well as anything with cat /usr/local/mailman/archives/private/kinejapan/*.txt > kinejapan.mbox -- Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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Admin Requests Not Working
by Dennis Putnam Feb. 5, 2015

Feb. 5, 2015

I'm on to the next layer of the onion for my migration. Now I have admin/moderator requests to handle. When I click the appropriate radio buttons and click the submit button, nothing happens. The page refreshes but the requests remain. TIA.

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