Mailman 3 August 2016 - Mailman-Users

Editing Mailman's text files
by Pete Bell May 8, 2024

May 8, 2024

Hi. I'm a new member of this group but have been running an email list with Mailman for a long time. I am now setting a list up again and want to give a "look and feel" to the list which has more branding of my user group as a whole, and less of a Mailman-feel. I seem to remember that besides editing the public HTML pages, it is possible to edit the text files which Mailman automatically sends out for certain needs (such as 'approve.txt', 'adminsubscribeack.txt', 'invite.txt', and so on). A. Is this still the case? B. If so, where can I find them? (in case they've changed from the ones I have from long ago). C. Where do they need putting, so that Mailman can use them again? It's important that I should tell you that Mailman on my webhosts servers is a "server-wide" installation, and I don't get to edit anything which other clients to their servers need. This would be only for my own use, and as such I need to know where these files go in my own webspace, and how to get Mailman to use them instead of the default ones. I should also say that I have done this before, so unless the facility to do this has been ditched in recent years, I *should* still be able to do it ! Does Mailman perhaps look for these files somewhere in my webspace (which I have to give a specific name), and if it doesn't find them it goes on to find its default versions of these files? Thanks in advance for your help. Pete Bell, UK

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Running two list with same email prefix
by Andrea Cappelli Feb. 27, 2024

Feb. 27, 2024

Hi all, I'm running a mail server with Debian Lenny, MTA is Postfix and i will use postfix-to-mailma.py script to run list I would set up Mailman for running mailing list with same email prefix on different domains, obvious with different list names For example we have ml.domain1.com and ml.domain2.net, i would like to have LISTADDRESS LISTNAME tech(a)ml.domain1.com tech-ml.domain1.com tech(a)ml.domain.2.net tech-ml.domain2.net In this way i can have the same address on differente domains and Mailman (my version is 2.1.11) can distinguish between lists because the list name is different. The list name will be also used to access web interface, so we have http://ml.domain1.com/mailman/admin/tech-ml.domain1.com http://ml.domain2.net/mailman/admin/tech-ml.domain2.net Is possible to accomplish this task? Any idea?

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Hide list address?
by Ricardo Kleemann Nov. 17, 2023

Nov. 17, 2023

Hi, Is there any way to configure Mailman such that, for an announcement-only type list, when a message is sent to the list, the To: shows the member's address, rather than the list address? Some list software allows the ability to hide the list address itself, so that address is not advertised. I couldn't find any configuration specific to that.

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Using cronjob to remove and add members to a mailing list
by Jerry Barnabee Aug. 10, 2022

Aug. 10, 2022

I want to be able to run a cronjob on my server that uses a php script to add new users and/or remove users from a mailing list. Not having any luck finding any simple examples. My thought is that the php script would get email addresses from a database (which I can do) and then feed them to a mailman command line to either add or remove a user. The cronjob is entered via Cpanel. Have several cronjobs that modify databases but have never tried something that would actually execute a unix command. Thanks, Pineyscripter

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Add "sender's name/email" to BODY of mail as header?
by Mal Feb. 17, 2021

Feb. 17, 2021

I want all mails sent to the list to come from the list's email address... But, in this case, if the user forgets to sign their name at the bottom of their mail body, effectively the mail to the list is anonymous...! Is there a way to add the user name (or email address) to the top of each mail so that the mails have the name of the sender, while the mail itself comes from the list address? I have looked high and low for an answer, but noone seems to have the solution. Thank you! Mal

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Mailman CGI Error-Group mismatch error
by Wang, Mary Y Sept. 10, 2020

Sept. 10, 2020

Hi, I received the following error this morning. So I rerun configure again with the following command: ./configure --with-cgi-id=apache --prefix=/var/mailman. I'm still getting the same error. Is there any place that I can look for so that I can debug this problem better? Perhaps, looking at the config history file or something. Any other places that I can check the cause of this error? "Mailman CGI error!!! The Mailman CGI wrapper encountered a fatal error. This entry is being stored in your syslog: Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the CGI wrapper script to be executed as group "nobody", but the system's web server executed the CGI script as group "apache". Try tweaking the web server to run the script as group "nobody", or re-run configure, providing the command line option `--with-cgi-gid=apache'." Thanks Mary

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Debugging mass invitations using web page interface...
by The Mailing List Server Admin Sept. 5, 2019

Sept. 5, 2019

Dear Mailman Cognoscenti, I'm helping one of my list owners send out 5K plus invitations to students to subscribe to his mailing list. Our current configuration: Mailman v2.1.20 RHEL v5.11 Semdmail v8.13.8 Apache v2.2.3 Since this was the first time doing this, I suggested breaking the batch input into 3 groups, 50, 500, and the rest. The 50 went fine, as did the 500, but the largest batch gave him a generic web server error: > Internal Server Error > > The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was > unable to complete your request. > > Please contact the server administrator, root(a)conundrum.unh.edu and > inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might > have done that may have caused the error. > > More information about this error may be available in the server > error log. I looked at the logs and I couldn't find anything that hinted at what went wrong. So I asked the owner to send me the last back and I'd give it a try. I wrote a script that removed folks already subscribed to his list and split the remaining subscribers up into 6 files with a thousand records each. I just tried uploading the 1st batch of 1K, with the following options: Subscribe these users now... (*) Invite Send welcome message... (*) No Send notifications... (*) No And entered a 7 line paragraph explaining the invitation. I ended up having the same error happen. Looking at the Mailman logs, I can't see any difference before or after my submission. In the HTTPD logs, I see: >> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [warn] [client 132.177.215.132] Timeout >> waiting for output from CGI script >> /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admin, referer: >> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add >> [Fri Aug 26 19:59:23 2016] [error] [client 132.177.215.132] >> Premature end of script headers: admin, referer: >> https://lists.unh.edu/mailman/admin/campus.connection/members/add So is there an inherent limit to the number of invites that can be submitted via the web form? As a work around, how would I do large invites on behalf of the owner from the command line, including the 'extra text' that is allowed via the web interface? -- Cordially, the UNH Mailing List Server Admins Bill Costa, senior admin (603) 862-3056

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changing domains on Mailman implementation
by Keith Seyffarth Sept. 20, 2018

Sept. 20, 2018

Is there an efficient way to change the domain name that mailman is affiliated with? I have two mailing lists that were created for an organization before that organization had their own domain. At the time the organization was sure they did not want their own domain and would not be getting a domain. Since then, they have chosen to get a domain and set up a web site. I would like to move their mailing lists onto their domain. It looks like the process for this is: 1) get the list of subscribers 2) delete the mailing list from the one domain (losing the archives) 3) create the mailing list on the new domain 4) subscribe the list of subscribers This process doesn't seem too difficult, but I would prefer to keep the archives, if possible. Both domains are on the same server, running CentOS7 and PLESK 12.5, if that makes a difference. Thanks, Keith

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mailman not respecting /etc/postfix/transport ???
by Steve Wehr Sept. 11, 2016

Sept. 11, 2016

I have about 100 mailing lists all using the domain name tunedinweb.com. All the commands to subscribe, etc, come to something(a)tunedinweb.com which come to my server and are processed by mailman. But I also have real email boxes @tunedinweb.com. Those are hosted off my server. So in order to make both mailman and my email work I have postfix configured with tunedinweb.com listed in the mydomains file, but have setup a transport file to tell postfix to redirect any email for something(a)tunedinweb.com to the server where that email is hosted. With lines in transport that look like this: steve(a)tunedinweb.com smtp:mx.emailsrvr.com stevew(a)tunedinweb.com smtp:mx.emailsrvr.com This is all working fine. The issue is that my email address steve(a)tunedinweb.com is also a member of several mailing lists. When mailman tries to send to steve(a)tunedinweb.com I see this error message in the postfix log /var/log/maillog: Jun 6 17:02:08 166941-web1 postfix/smtpd[25836]: NOQUEUE: reject: RCPT from localhost[127.0.0.1]: 550 5.1.1 <steve(a)tunedinweb.com>: Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table; from=<tunedin-temp-bounces+steve=tunedinweb.com(a)tunedinweb.com> to=<steve(a)tunedinweb.com> proto=ESMTP helo=<166941-web1.tunedinweb.com> So it seems that mailman is not respecting the /etc/postfix transport file settings. I want mailman to send mail for those addresses specified in the transport file to the server where that email is hosted. I must be missing something. Can someone explain what is going wrong. Thanks again for your help. _____________________ Steve Wehr Tunedin Web Design <http://www.tunedinweb.com/> 845-246-9643

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unsubscriptions due to automatic bounce processing
by Matt Morgan Aug. 28, 2016

Aug. 28, 2016

I recently took over a lot of pre-existing mailman lists for a new client. At least one list was pretty messy. They had automatic bounce processing turned on, but the threshold was high, and reset time was shorter than the typical length of times between postings (it's an announce-only list that goes out about once monthly). So there were a lot of bad addresses. I decided to set it up to clean out the cruft fast, and then I'd temper it back a little. So I set it up like this: bounce_processing: yes bounce_score_threshold: 2.0 bounce_info_stale_after: 63 bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings: 0 bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings_interval: 7 bounce_unrecognized_goes_to_list_owner: no bounce_notify_owner_on_disable: yes bounce_notify_owner_on_removal: yes It appears to have worked, but what I'm confused about is this: the last mailing went out on August 11th, and the list owners got 750 automatic unsubscribes yesterday. "bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings" set to zero is supposed to mean that people are removed "immediately" ... but maybe that means "immediately, once some scheduled script or job runs"? Let me know what controls that, or if I'm maybe going the wrong direction here. I.e., does bounce processing only happens once every few weeks, perhaps? Thanks, Matt

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