[Mailman-Users] Programmatic Subscription

[Brad Knowles]

Bill Honneus (honneus) wrote:

> When a user subscribes or unsubscribes from a mailing list, they are
> sent an email confirmation and must click a link on the web interface or
> reply to the email to confirm their subscription/removal. One of our
> engineers is creating a portlet on a web application, and what he wants
> to do is allow  the user to be immediately subscribed as soon as they
> click a link.  Is there a way to configure Mailman so that a user is
> immediately subscribed or removed without the confirmation process?

It's easy enough to do with the command-line tools, if you know what you're 
doing.

> Alternatively, if we were to write some custom code on our application,
> could we simply call the subscribe cgi script, and then send the
> confirmation request from the application without asking the user for
> further input?
>  
> Please let me know if this is a sound approach.

I would strongly encourage you folks to *NOT* do this.  It's so easy to 
abuse these kinds of systems and sign someone up for a billion different 
mailing lists.

There's a reason why the default with Mailman is so that the user has to 
confirm their subscription request.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at python.org>
Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team, & Co-moderator of the
mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists