[Mailman-Users] Find out a list admin password ?

[Harald Meland]

[Ian Jackson]

> 1. Are the mailman developers aware that mailman can lose mail ?  The
> message which mailman tried to send (via SMTP) was rejected by my
> local Exim because the sender was wrong, and the only trace I can now
> find of it is in the various error logs.  The message body is nowhere
> to be found.

Yes, we are aware of that.  I believe this is a design issue: Mailman
should rather dequeue than defer messages that for non-obvious reasons
aren't accepted by the SMTP server.  This means, among other things,
that Mailman won't try resending a message that tickles some bug in
your MTA over and over...

However, "non-obvious reasons" should not include error responses on
MAIL FROM.  In current CVS, such errors cause deferral and writes a
message stating the problem to Mailman's logs.

[ I considered having Mailman try to contact the site Mailman admin,
  as well -- but as the likely cause of refused senders is relaying
  restrictions being set too tight, doing automatic mailing could
  rather easily start an avalanche of messages. ]

> 2. What is the published, documented way of finding out or resetting
> a list owner password ?  I can probably dig into python and get it out
> that way, but I would like a proper published interface ?

The list admin passwords are stored as one-way crypted strings (either
with MD5 or with standard UNIX crypt).  So, to find out what the
password was, you'll have to do some brute-forcing...

Change of list admin passwords can be done at the bottom of the
DEFAULT_URL/admin/LISTNAME web page, by using the site admin password
as the "old" list password.

> 3. What is the site admin password for ?  I deduce its existence from
> the presence of a program to set it ...

See answer to previous question.  The site admin password works
everywhere either a list admin password or some member's password
would work.

> In general I have a feeling that I'm missing some of the
> documentation.

So do I -- Mailman documentation is currently all too sparse.  Any
 effort to change this would be greatly appreciated :)

Much of the code have good docstrings and is quite well commented,
though.
-- 
Harald