During our Listserv to Mailman migration, I started keeping a tips file to remind myself of the syntax for helpful commands, so I wanted to share those tidbits here as an appendix along with some notes/caveats and useful pages on other sites.

Commands

• To see all the settings for a mailman list: /usr/lib/mailman/bin/config_list -o – ‘listname’  (outputs to screen; use -o filename to output to a file)
• To see a list’s settings minus comments and whitespace: config_list -o – ‘listname’ | perl -ne ‘print unless /(^#|^\s*$)/’
• To change the password for a list: /usr/lib/mailman/bin/change_pw -l ‘listname’ -p ‘newpass’ -q (the -q prevents a notice going to the list owners)
• To show the subscribers of a list: /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -f ‘listname’ (the -f shows full names for subscribers)
• To show the owners of a list: /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_owners ‘listname’ (if you use list_admins instead, it seems to do the same thing)
• To rebuild all list archives (in bash): for list in `/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_lists -b | egrep -v ‘^mailman$’`; do /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch –wipe $list; done
• To restart Mailman (as root or mailman user): /etc/init.d/mailman restart
• To one or more list settings for a list: config_list -o – ‘listname’ > tmp.txt; then edit tmp.txt to leave only the setting you want to change; config_list -i tmp.txt ‘listname’
• To apply a setting change to multiple lists, use config_list -o – ‘listname’ > tmp.txt and edit tmp.txt as above, but then use shell looping: or list in adf-foo adf-bar etc; do config_list -i setting.txt $list ; done

Notes

I’d intended to list here each code file I’m making available along with a description, but instead I put the code descriptions in the Apache directory pages so just look there.

The Mailman logs on our server are in /var/log/mailman and /var/log/mailman/error contains the most recent errors.

Important: Our list host informed me that the default “mailman” list must be kept around, you can’t just delete it or important Mailman things will (apparently) break. So you’ve been warned 🙂

To increase the max # of recipients for a message to be able to get posted (in case you have lists where legitimate posts get rejected due to having too many recipients), see the max_num_recipients setting, which is in the Privacy Options -> Recipient Filters part of the web interface.

I created the arch_wipe_all script because I’d tried running the commands in it from the shell but it took so many hours (70+ lists and 10+ years of archives) that my shell would get disconnected and I’d have to start over completely. By putting the commands in a script I could preface it with nohup so it would keep running even if I got disconnected.

I noticed in /etc/mailman/postfix-to-mailman.py that if DEB_LISTMASTER isn’t set in /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py or /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py that error mail will go to postmaster@localhost, but I wanted it sent to another address in our organization so I added DEB_LISTMASTER = ‘addr@ourhost.org’ to the bottom of /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py.

Pre-migration messages in people’s mailboxes had links to the old Listserv archives  in the footer, so even though we changed the footer for Mailman, we needed to provide redirects in case someone used an old link. We did this with an Apache URL Rewrite rule to redirect http://lists.ourhost.org/archives/listname.html to http://lists.ourhost.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/listname/:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^archives/(.+)\.html$ http://lists.us.org/cgi-bin/mailman/private/$1/ [R]

(the second line, the RewriteRule, needs to be all on one line)

During one part of our disk issues converting our archives, our server admin said we’d maxed out our number of inodes (files and directories), probably because of the large number of archive related files (70+ lists for 10+ years). If you see errors like “unable to write file”, you can check the inodes used on the disk itself with df -i, and check inodes for your user with quota -sv username.

Bookmarks

The following pages weren’t listed in other parts of the guide and may be useful:

• Summary of the Mailman bin command line programs
• Mailman List Management Guide (2001 though, but has good settings descriptions)
• Changing List Owners On A Mailman Mailing List
• How do I integrate Mailman with PHP, or any other web technology?
• Mailman Installation Manual
• Mailman List Member Manual
• Regenerating Large Mailman Archives (I did not have to do the steps in this page even though our archives are 10+ years)
• How to edit the archives of a Mailman List
• How to remove a post from a Mailman list archive, or an entire archive (Note: to remove a post completely, I prefer to use Thunderbird to edit the mbox file)
• Mailman bounce processing explanations
• Mailman Frequently Asked Questions

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