Mailman 3 March 2017 - 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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Using cronjob to remove and add members to a mailing list
by Jerry Barnabee Aug. 10, 2022

Aug. 10, 2022

I want to be able to run a cronjob on my server that uses a php script to add new users and/or remove users from a mailing list. Not having any luck finding any simple examples. My thought is that the php script would get email addresses from a database (which I can do) and then feed them to a mailman command line to either add or remove a user. The cronjob is entered via Cpanel. Have several cronjobs that modify databases but have never tried something that would actually execute a unix command. Thanks, Pineyscripter

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Automate Moderator Functions
by Andre de Azevedo Cunha April 18, 2022

April 18, 2022

Hi, i`m trying to reject messages bigger then MAX_MESSAGE_SIZE. I configured my Hold.py was described bellow: replaced hold_for_approval(mlist, msg, msgdata, _ MessageTooBig(bodylen,_mlist.max_message_size)) with rej = MessageTooBig(bodylen, mlist.max_message_size) _ raise Errors.RejectMessage, rej.reason_notice_ The message was rejected, but the sender dont receive any notify about that. The mailman vette log too. How can i solve this? Thanks, André Dennis Putnam wrote: > >I am getting back to this and I have a question about maintenance. What >is the correct way to modify this so that it will not get destroyed by >updates? There are two ways to proceed. You can modify Mailman/Handlers/Hold.py itself, but before overwriting it, make a "diff -u" between the base Hold.py and your modified version to use as a patch to apply after any upgrade. A better way is to leave Hold.py unchanged and make your own edited version as say Mailman/Handlers/MyHold.py. Then you can replace the base Hold.py Module with your MyHold.py by putting GLOBAL_PIPELINE[GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('Hold')] = 'MyHold' in mm_cfg.py. Note that if you are going to do this, and you want also to move MimeDel before Hold, you must either put the above line after the lines GLOBAL_PIPELINE.remove('MimeDel') GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('Hold'), 'MimeDel') in mm_cfg.py or put it before, but then also change GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('Hold'), 'MimeDel') to GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('MyHold'), 'MimeDel') I recommend the former as in # # Put MimeDel ahead of Hold so "too big" is based on content filtered # message. # GLOBAL_PIPELINE.remove('MimeDel') GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('Hold'), 'MimeDel') # # Replace Hold with local version # GLOBAL_PIPELINE[GLOBAL_PIPELINE.index('Hold')] = 'MyHold' Since mm_cfg.py survives upgrades, this should survive. >Also does this same procedure apply to other automatic rejections such >as implicit destination? >On 9/24/2012 8:43 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote: >> >> To automatically reject or discard messages that exceed the list's size >> limit, find the section of the Mailman/Handlers/Hold.py that ends with >> the lines >> >> >> if bodylen/1024.0 > mlist.max_message_size: >> hold_for_approval(mlist, msg, msgdata, >> MessageTooBig(bodylen, >> mlist.max_message_size)) >> # no return >> >> (there is one wrapped line in the above) and replace >> >> hold_for_approval(mlist, msg, msgdata, >> MessageTooBig(bodylen, >> mlist.max_message_size)) >> >> with >> >> rej = MessageTooBig(bodylen, mlist.max_message_size)) >> raise Errors.RejectMessage, rej.reason_notice >> >> to reject the message or with >> >> raise Errors.DiscardMessage >> >> to discard the message. Note that this will not honor the list's >> forward_auto_discards setting. to do that you would need to put >> >> from Mailman.Handlers.Moderate import do_discard >> >> with the other imports near the beginning of the >> Mailman.Handlers.hold.py module and then replace the lines with >> >> do_discard(mlist, msg) Yes, similar changes would apply to other holds in Hold.py. -- Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net [1]> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan -- Links: ------ [1] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users

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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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Find a smtp server to send out emails
by Leon March 20, 2020

March 20, 2020

Hi, This problem is not caused by mailman, but I still want to give it a shot here. I'm hosting a mailing list on top of mailman. Emails are supposed to be sent out by AWS ses. However, ses requires that sender address must be verified, which leads to a problem that emails sent by subscribers to mailing list cannot be sent to other subcirbers, since their addresses are not verified. And it is impossible to verified every subscriber. Are there smtp service providers allowing unverified email address to send out emails, or do I have other solutions? Thanks. Leon

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Debugging mass invitations using web page interface...
by The Mailing List Server Admin Sept. 5, 2019

Sept. 5, 2019

Dear Mailman Cognoscenti, I'm helping one of my list owners send out 5K plus invitations to students to subscribe to his mailing list. Our current configuration: Mailman v2.1.20 RHEL v5.11 Semdmail v8.13.8 Apache v2.2.3 Since this was the first time doing this, I suggested breaking the batch input into 3 groups, 50, 500, and the rest. The 50 went fine, as did the 500, but the largest batch gave him a generic web server error: > Internal Server Error > > The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was > unable to complete your request. > > Please contact the server administrator, root(a)conundrum.unh.edu and > inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might > have done that may have caused the error. > > More information about this error may be available in the server > error log. I looked at the logs and I couldn't find anything that hinted at what went wrong. So I asked the owner to send me the last back and I'd give it a try. I wrote a script that removed folks already subscribed to his list and split the remaining subscribers up into 6 files with a thousand records each. I just tried uploading the 1st batch of 1K, with the following options: Subscribe these users now... (*) Invite Send welcome message... (*) No Send notifications... (*) No And entered a 7 line paragraph explaining the invitation. I ended up having the same error happen. Looking at the Mailman logs, I can't see any difference before or after my submission. In the HTTPD logs, I see: >> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [warn] [client 132.177.215.132] Timeout >> waiting for output from CGI script >> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admin, referer: >> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add >> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [error] [client 132.177.215.132] >> Premature end of script headers: admin, referer: >> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add So is there an inherent limit to the number of invites that can be submitted via the web form? As a work around, how would I do large invites on behalf of the owner from the command line, including the 'extra text' that is allowed via the web interface? -- Cordially, the UNH Mailing List Server Admins Bill Costa, senior admin (603) 862-3056

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