On Mon, 2014-05-12 at 16:14 -0400, Bernie Cosell wrote:

in the face of zillions of bounce/unsubscribes thanks to the DMARC mess, what I'd like to do is get the sysadmin to snapshot the list members from, say, a week ago. Then when we get things cleaned up I can 'restore' the list as it was. I don't know how to do it and I tried googling and only found:

https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2003-March/027011.html

which said

~/mailman/lists/<list_name>/config.db

On our system, though, all I find is:

mailman$ ls Mailman/ archive/ bin/ cgi-bin/ cron/ icons/ mail/ messages/
pythonlib/ scripts/ templates/ tests/

so no "lists" diretory at all. Obviously that's for a very old version of mailman We have: Using Mailman version: 2.1.9

Mark may have more detailed information on this, more specific to your version, but here's what I can tell you from many years as a Mailman user.

With regard to "config.db", I believe this is now a pickled file called config.pck, and the MM file hierarchy has been split up so that the "lists" directory is now generally in a separate tree independent of ~mailman. In a standard MM installation, this is /var/lib/mailman.

My approach to this problem would be to locate the mailman logs and pull the auto-unsubscriptions addresses from there. The following command does this for MM 2.1.18:

grep "auto-unsubscribed" /full/path/to/logs/subscribe| grep <listname>|awk '{printf($7"\n")}'

In MM 2.1.18, the log file is /var/lib/mailman/logs/subscribe. If the log file format has changed over the last 9 releases, you may need to change the parameter number for awk's printf command to something other than $7, but there's a good chance that this will get you, or your sysadmin, a bare list of email addresses unsubscribed during the time period covered by the log file.

As I said, Mark will probably have more details on this stuff. He usually does.

-- Lindsay Haisley | "Everything works if you let it" FMP Computer Services | 512-259-1190 | - The Roadie http://www.fmp.com |

On Mon, 2014-05-12 at 16:14 -0400, Bernie Cosell wrote:

in the face of zillions of bounce/unsubscribes thanks to the DMARC mess, what I'd like to do is get the sysadmin to snapshot the list members from, say, a week ago.

I ought to also point out that using config.db or config.pck will only get you information about _current_ subscribers, including those whose subscriptions are still present but disabled because of bounces. Pulling a pure and simple list of email addresses from the latter group out of the config database generally requires a bit of jiggery-pokery with a text editor, but the database dump has everything fairly clearly labeled. You can use the ~mailman/bin/dumpdb utility to get a plain-text dump of the database once you determine the full path to the config database (config.db or config.pck). If you can get a backup copy of the config file from before about Apr. 8 then all the information you want will be there. Absent this, once actual auto-unsubscriptions started, the only way to recover auto-unsubscribed addresses is by pulling them from Mailman's subscribe log file, as noted in my previous email.

-- Lindsay Haisley | "Everything works if you let it" FMP Computer Services | 512-259-1190 | - The Roadie http://www.fmp.com |