[Mailman-Users] Saving list subscribers from a backup

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Mon, 2014-05-12 at 16:14 -0400, Bernie Cosell wrote:
> in the face of zillions of bounce/unsubscribes thanks to the DMARC mess, 
> what I'd like to do is get the sysadmin to snapshot the list members 
> from, say, a week ago.  Then when we get things cleaned up I can 
> 'restore' the list as it was.  I don't know how to do it and I tried 
> googling and only found:
> 
> https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2003-March/027011.html
> 
> which said
> 
> ~/mailman/lists/<list_name>/config.db 
> 
> On our system, though, all I find is:
> 
> mailman$ ls
> Mailman/  archive/  bin/  cgi-bin/  cron/  icons/  mail/  messages/  
> pythonlib/  scripts/  templates/  tests/
> 
> so no "lists" diretory at all.  Obviously that's for a very old version 
> of mailman   We have:
>    Using Mailman version: 2.1.9

Mark may have more detailed information on this, more specific to your
version, but here's what I can tell you from many years as a Mailman
user.

With regard to "config.db", I believe this is now a pickled file called
config.pck, and the MM file hierarchy has been split up so that the
"lists" directory is now generally in a separate tree independent of
~mailman.  In a standard MM installation, this is /var/lib/mailman.

My approach to this problem would be to locate the mailman logs and pull
the auto-unsubscriptions addresses from there.  The following command
does this for MM 2.1.18:

grep "auto-unsubscribed" /full/path/to/logs/subscribe| grep <listname>|awk '{printf($7"\n")}'

In MM 2.1.18, the log file is /var/lib/mailman/logs/subscribe.  If the
log file format has changed over the last 9 releases, you may need to
change the parameter number for awk's printf command to something other
than $7, but there's a good chance that this will get you, or your
sysadmin, a bare list of email addresses unsubscribed during the time
period covered by the log file.

As I said, Mark will probably have more details on this stuff.  He
usually does.

-- 
Lindsay Haisley       | "Everything works if you let it"
FMP Computer Services |
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