[Mailman-Users] exporting / importing users

[David Melton]

----- Original Message -----
From: "tom dyson" <tom at torchbox.com>
To: <mailman-users at python.org>
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2001 3:56 AM
Subject: [Mailman-Users] exporting / importing users


> Hi there
>
> I'm wondering if it's possible to import or export subscribers of a
> particular list (without using the web interface). I've got three specific
> questions:
>
> 1. How would I go about importing a comma separated list of 12,000 email
> addresses into an existing mailman list?

bin/add_members can be used to add a list of email addresses to a list.
This
utility wants to see one exactly one email address per line, so you'll
probably
need to use some simple scripting or shell commands to extract the
appropriate
data from your CSV file.

> 2. How could I export email addresses of users from an existing mailman
list
> into some standard format (e.g. CSV, XML)?

bin/list_members will output a list all of the subscribers to a list, one
address per
line.  You can run this output through a script to add commas, XML tags,
etc.
as needed.

> 3. How does mailman store this stuff anyway?

In lists/<listname>/config.db, which is not directly readable.  I'm not
involved
with Mailman's development effort, but I would recommend using the utilities
mentioned above, to maintain compatibility with future releases.  If you
wrote
code to use the database file, it might not work right with the next
release, or
your code could accidentally kill your list by damaging the database.

Hope this helps,
  Dave Melton