[Mailman-Users] Controlling Mailman 2.1.x remotely

[S. Patrick Eaton]

Hello, Mailman experts.

I've been doing some development work for a Tokyo-based NPO that offers
participation in a number of Mailman lists as one of the benefits of
membership in the organization. Because membership in the organization is a
requirement for participating in the Mailman discussions, the organization
has not been providing members with direct access to the Mailman
administrative features for subscribing and unsubscribing, but instead has
been providing a homegrown administrative interface that uses PHP and curl
to simulate user interactions via POST.

When a recent update to Mailman introduced CSRF tokens, however, this
approach broke down and the organization has been struggling to figure out
how to manage the lists ever since. We know that Mailman 3 provides an API,
which is exactly what we need, but because the site and Mailman lists are
both on shared hosting, we are currently only able to use Mailman 2.1.x.

Can anyone recommend a good approach to managing subscriptions in an
automated way using either PHP or Python until such time as we can get our
host to upgrade to Mailman 3?

Any suggestions or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

With many thanks in advance,

Sako Eaton