[Mailman-Users] Migrating a list to a new email address
Bill Christensen
billc_lists at greenbuilder.com
Fri May 15 06:32:00 CEST 2015
Hi all,
I have a long running list with thousands of subscribers that needs to
move to a new set of email addresses.
The existing list is announce-only, so doesn't get a whole lot of
traffic - typically at most a few outgoing emails a year. But some time
back a bot started sending spam registrations via hits to the web server
in the form
<domain name>
/mailman/subscribe.cgi/bwbnewsletter?email=<bogus_registrant>@<somedomain.tld><mailto:ruanwei12 at hotmail.com>&fullname=&pw=123456789&pw-conf=123456789&language=en&digest=0&email-button=Subscribe.
I long ago routed real users to an alternative signup, but the spam
keeps coming, unrelenting, and are now anywhere between 1k and 10k per day.
I'm thinking that the best way to deal with this is to move everything,
including the archives, to a newly created list on the same domain
name. The alternative signup method i've set up works, so if i set the
new list to "Advertise this list..." = NO in Privacy, I'm hoping the
spammers won't figure out that the new mailman list exists. I could
also set it up as a closed list if that's possible since the new
registrations will be entered manually in bulk, though I don't see any
settings which disallow all subscriptions.
So I'd like confirmation on how to move a list to a new address under
the same domain. I figure I need to:
1) take a backup copy of the <oldlistname>.mbox file in /archives/private
2) take a copy of the current subscriber list (already done using the
list_members command)
3) create the new list, aliases, etc and associated email addresses
4) remove /archives/private/<newlistname>.mbox
5) rename <oldlistname>.mbox to <newlistname>.mbox
5b) do I need to replace all instances of <oldlistname> with
<newlistname> everywhere they occur in the .mbox file? Would doing so
cause any problems?
6) rebuild the archives
7) test the new list
8) bulk subscribe the subscriber list to <newlistname>
9) delete the old list
Did I miss anything?
Thanks in advance.
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