Mailman 3 May 2022 - 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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Mailman3 - from Whoosh to Xapian
by Kimmo L. July 5, 2022

July 5, 2022

Hello! My idea/plan is to replace Whoosh with Xapian. So far i have added this line inside settings.py: 'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine', and installed pip package: pip install xapian-haystack Put i think its not enough and im missing something. If i try to do use "mailman-web rebuild_index", then i get some error messages: File "/opt/mailman/venv/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/xapian_backend.py", line 23, in <module> import xapian ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'xapian' Any ideas what im missing ? Br, Kimmo

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Problem with outlook.com
by nikos June 15, 2022

June 15, 2022

Hello list. For some reason none of hotmail or outlook users don't receive any of our newsletter. Finally all of them auto unsubscribe. The following is an error received form protection.outlook.com: Remote Server returned '550 5.6.0 CAT.InvalidContent.Exception: ExchangeDataException, Decoding of header Subject failed+ADs- raw value: +AFs-Ps+AF0- +AD0-?iso8859-7?b?wer98fnz5yDF8OX05enh6t7yIOXq5N7r+-fPn8iDz9Oft?+AD0-; cannot handle content of message That happened since September 10th this year. Before, all received without problem. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance. Nikos.

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How to wrap text in archived messages
by Mark Dale June 1, 2022

June 1, 2022

Hi, I'm looking for a way to wrap lines in archived messages. Messages from some mail clients (eg. Gmail) have their lines wrapped to 72 chars in the archived version, while archived messages from others (eg. Thunderbird, Outlook) display unwrapped lines forcing the reader to scroll horizontally. Looking at the HTML page source -- in both cases (wrapped and unwrapped) I see the message content is enclosed by PRE tags. <HR>  <PRE> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur ... Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud ... </PRE>  <HR> The template (article.html) contains the following: ... <HR>  %(body)s  <HR> ... From what I can figure out, the PRE tags come from .../mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py in a block of code lines 1290 to 1314 ... /////////////////////////////////////////// def format_article(self, article): # called from add_article # TBD: Why do the HTML formatting here and keep it in the # pipermail database? It makes more sense to do the html # formatting as the article is being written as html and toss # the data after it has been written to the archive file. lines = filter(None, article.body) # Handle <HTML> </HTML> directives if self.ALLOWHTML: self.__processbody_HTML(lines) self.__processbody_URLquote(lines) if not self.SHOWHTML and lines: lines.insert(0, '<PRE>') lines.append('</PRE>') else: # Do fancy formatting here if self.SHOWBR: lines = map(lambda x:x + "<BR>", lines) else: for i in range(0, len(lines)): s = lines[i] if s[0:1] in ' \t\n': lines[i] = '<P>' + s article.html_body = lines return article //////////////////////////// And the lines in that block that seem responsible for the PRE tags are ... lines.insert(0, '<PRE>') lines.append('</PRE>') My question is: Can those PRE tags be removed and replaced with something equivalent to PHP's "nl2br" (which inserts a line break BR in place of new line entries)? A Google search for such an equivalent gives me ... def nl2br(s): return '<br />\n'.join(s.split('\n')) With zero understanding of Python my attempts to implement this have failed so far and I may well be barking up the wrong tree completely. Any clues or pointers gratefully received. Thanks.

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detecting pending subscriptions across many lists?
by Karl Berry May 31, 2022

May 31, 2022

On lists.gnu.org, we have some 3300 mailman lists. Is there any way to know, or even probabilistically guess, which have pending subscriptions, short of running list_requests on every one? For pending messages, we can look for the presence of heldmsg-* files in the mailman data dir (/var/lib/mailman/data for us), but I've been unable to discern the existence of pending subscriptions anywhere except in config.pck. I also couldn't discern a way to grep in config.pck (which would be much faster than list_requests). Is there some sequence that will only appear with pending subscriptions? Looking at one list with a pending subscription now, I see the byte string e64d 4b07 4b05 741d 014b 5574 4110 occuring before the address that wants to subscribe, but not sure if that, or any part of it, would be a reliable thing to look for. We appear to be running mailman 2.1.29. Not sure if it is the distro version (Trisquel GNU/Linux 9.0.2) or installed from the original source, but guessing that probably doesn't matter for this. Any info greatly appreciated. --thanks, karl.

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Question on outputting all lists and list owners and a process for batch disabling of lists without an owner
by John Lake May 28, 2022

May 28, 2022

Howdy! To start with, a belated thank you is in order for Mark Sapiro –I leveraged your suggestion for batch changing list owners (in our case, changing list owner from owner “a” to owner “b” for 700 lists) from your post here: https://answers.launchpad.net/mailman/+question/111591 😊 Our security department has asked me to canvas all of our lists (4,237!)—and if a list owner value is not defined they want me to disable the list. 1. Can I combine the list_lists and list_owners commands to output both (hopefully linked) values as a .csv? 2. Is there a script that any of you have leveraged to batch disable lists without a defined owner? Thanks in advance for the assistance, I really appreciate this community as I don’t have much Linux Fu and the GNU resources and assistance have been invaluable! Best, John

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