[Mailman-Users] Welcome message

[Mark Sapiro]

PeteBell wrote:
>
>I saw a reply to a query recently about editing the "welcome" message 
>for a list.
>
>My question is twofold:
>
>I don't have access to the installation of Mailman, as it is shared. 
>However, my host has been good at making certain files available to me 
>on request. So...
>
>(a) Which file is the correct one and how do I go about editing the 
>file? Is it Python, a particular component of Python, or a text 
>application, and how do I go about saving it back again into the 
>correct format? (I have never used Python yet, so please be explicit 
>and easy-to-follow)!


The welcome message is subscribeack.txt (more later on where it is).


>(b) Are there any other admin-editable notification emails which can be 
>done in the same way?

The subscribeack.txt file is one of several .txt and .html templates
that can be edited on a per list, per virtual domain or sitewide
basis. See
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.048.htp
for information on where to put edited templates to effect this.

The .txt files are templates for e-mail messages and are simple plain
text files except they contain things such as %(listinfo_url)s which
will be replaced by the value of the named attribute as they are used.

The .html files are templates for web pages and are ordinary HTML
except they contain tags of the form <MM-*> (for example
<MM-List-Name>) which are replaced by defined substitutions as they
are used. You really have to look at the Python module
Mailman/HTMLFormatter.py and other modules listinfo.py, options.py,
roster.py and subscribe.py in the Cgi/ directory to see what the
various <MM-*> tag replacements are, but you can get some idea by just
comparing the generated HTML with the template.

To see what templates are available, look in the templates/xx/
directory where xx is the language. Since you don't have direct access
to your Mailman installation server, you have two choices -

download the Mailman tarball from SourceForge at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103&package_id=69562&release_id=238606
and extract it

or use the CVS browser at SourceForge to download individual files.
E.g. go to
http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/mailman/mailman/templates/en/
for the English language templates.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan