[Mailman-Users] disable a mailing list

[Odhiambo Washington]

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 6:10 PM, Stoyan Angelov <s_angelov at filibeto.org>wrote:

> On 08/24/10 18:28, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> Stoyan Angelov wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> i want to temporary disable one of my mailing lists while keeping the
>>> archives available. i run mailman 2.1.12 with sendmail. i was thinking
>>> about doing the following:
>>>
>>> . remove the appropriate aliases from /path/to/aliases (redirecting the
>>> <mailling-list>-owner of the affected list to some real address)
>>> . move the /path/to/mailman/lists/<disabled-list>  directory to a
>>> temporary location
>>>
>>> is this the proper way to disable a list? is there anything else that
>>> needs to be done?
>>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, that is a good way to temporarily disable a list. I think you
>> could actually leave the aliases in place (except for maybe changing
>> the -owner alias), and the pipe to the mail/mailman wrapper will fail
>> resulting in a reject to the sender. You should test to see if you
>> think the reject is appropriate. You can do this by creating an alias
>> like
>>
>> bogus: "|/path/to/mail/mailman post bogus"
>>
>> and sending a message to that address.
>>
>>
> hello Mark,
>
> thank you for your answer! very helpful as always; please excuse my very
> late reply...
>
> i did the test with sending a test message to a bogus alias - the good
> thing is that in the returned message there is some info:
>
>   ----- Transcript of session follows -----
> post script, list not found: bogus
> 554 5.3.0 unknown mailer error 1
>
> this is nice since it says... "no such list here" and i am also able to see
> all failed posts in mailman's error log. the negative thing is that the
> returned mail exposes my mailman installation path:
>
> The original message was received at Fri, 17 Sep 2010 17:35:10 +0300 (EEST)
> from myhost.mydomain.dom [192.192.192.192]
>
>   ----- The following addresses had permanent fatal errors -----
> "|/my/real/path/to/mailman/mail/mailman post bogus"
> <snip>
> Final-Recipient: RFC822; mybogus-alias at mydomain.dom
> X-Actual-Recipient: X-Unix; |/my/real/path/to/mailman/mail/mailman post
> bogus
>
>  <snip><http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/odhiambo%40gmail.com>
>

That, I see no problem with! It's a good  "diagnostic" message. I know you
don't see it as such, but if your server isn't secured is what you need to
worry about. Nobody will access that path if server is secured properly.


-- 
Best regards,
Odhiambo WASHINGTON,
Nairobi,KE
+254733744121/+254722743223
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
"If you have nothing good to say about someone, just shut up!."
               -- Lucky Dube