[Mailman-Users] Deleting an undeletable list member, removing a bad email address

[A & D Davidson]

re: Deleting an undeletable list member, removing a bad email address,
currupt membername, unsubscribing multiple members.

I've just spent a while looking for help on a problem with a bad
address entry in Mailman.  Since the first several keywords I tried
failed, I thought I'd post what worked.  There's also a probable
bug indicated here...

I added 150+ users to a list via the web interface.  Each one was
in the format of:
email at domain.com - Firstname Lastname

Rather than stripping the names, this was parsed into the database as:
email at domain.com - Firstname

All such entries were invalid (no mail sent to them, errors in the
logs), and I needed to clean them out.  But the web interface
refused to remove these users when I 'unchecked' their entries in
the admin pages.

Attempts to use ./remove_members kept failing, too... until I found
this message:

 http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2001-April/010702.html

In a nutshell, the above message says one needs to use:
./remove_members listname 'email at domain.com - Firstname'
(the quotes are the significant part).  In fact, its example was
even more complex (having to eliminate a string with quote chars
in it).

Last of all, here are the quick-n-dirty commandline steps
I created.  Yes, I know they can be improved on.  Since this was my
first use of 'sed', though, I was just happy to get things done.  Better
still would have been to incorporate the changes into the Mailman python
code, or at least a line warning about bad membernames and handling
quotes into remove_members' documentation:

(you'll want to change listname to your list's name, be in the mailman/bin
directory, etc... )

./list_members listname |grep ' - ' >grepdash
sed "s/^/.\/remove_members listname '\1/" grepdash >sed1
sed "s/$/\1'/" >sed2
chmod ug+x sed2
./sed2

Regards,
--d2