Hey list,

I'm not sure if anyone has done this before (probably), but I figured I'd run my solution by those more knowledgeable of the inner workings of GNU Mailman.

My Python 3 / PyGI / Gtk+ application, among other things, prompts a user for their name, email, and password, and then submits an http POST request to a hard coded remote GNU Mailman server. So far, the code appears to work and I'll request a peer review by anyone kind enough:

<http://rod.gs/Cbq>

One potential concern I've found is that it is difficult to machine parse the server response to reliably distinguish a successful subscription from a failure. A successful subscription returns an http code 200, but so do many failed ones (e.g. bad formatted email address is still code 200).

The most reliable brute force method I could come up with was to check the message body of the returned HTML document for the substring "Your subscription request has been received". Great, except since Mailman is i18n capable, its gettext could return something semantically equivalent, but obviously worded different if the locale is changed.

However, since the server I am submitting the request to will probably always use the English user interface, this probably won't be an issue, but is still inelegant and I'd like to solve it. Moreover, even if it remains in English, but perhaps the string changes anyways when Mailman is upgraded, then it is a problem again.

Does anyone have any suggestions or other feedback they'd like to share or propose a better solution?

-- Kip Warner -- Software Engineer OpenPGP encrypted/signed mail preferred http://www.thevertigo.com