Mailman mailing list commands

GNU Mailman provides a means to manage electronic mailing lists. The software is written primarily in Python and is free; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), which allows you to modify the code for the software, if you wish.

If your email address is in a Mailman mailing list, you can send an email message to the list with help in the subject or body of the email to get an email reply showing you the commands that you can put in email messages to the list. E.g., supposing that you are a member of a mailing list called "browncoats" on the server example.com. To see a list of the available commands supported by the Mailman mailing list handling email to that mailing list, you would send an email with help in the subject or body of the message to browncoats-request@example.com. I.e., you would put the name of the mailing list, in this case "browncoats" followed by a dash and the word "request" as the email address to which you would be sending the command. If you put help in the body of the message, you don't need to specify a subject, but put help as the first line of the message with no other text on the line.

[ More Info ]

[/network/email/mailing_list/mailman] permanent link

Mailman moderation bit

If you go to the membership management page for a Mailman mailing list, you will see a checkbox next to every member's address in a "mod" column and an option to "Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible" near the bottom of the web page. If you check the mod checkbox next to the member's address, the list member will not be able to send messages to the list without the message being approved by the list owner or a moderator for the list.

When the box is checked for a member, postings from the member are held and administrators are notified of their existence. They may then approve or reject postings via the web interface. If unchecked postings to the list are immediately delivered to list membership.

If a list is to be used only for announcements from the list owner and designated moderators, then everyone else should have the box checked.

Note: Applies to Mailman 2.1.14 as well as other versions.

References:

1. GNU Mailman List Management Guide v 2.0
   GNU Mailman Documentation

[/network/email/mailing_list/mailman] permanent link

Prevent Mailing List Email from Going Into Junk E-mail or Spam Folders

I posted instructions for Hotmail, Gmail, and Outlook users for steps that can be taken to prevent email sent from mailing lists from being automatically placed in junk email or spam folders.

[/network/email/mailing_list] permanent link

Mailman Mailing List Messages Arriving with Unwanted Attachment

I set up a Mailman mailing list for a family member. After I set up the list, she sent a message to the list. The message arrived with a .txt attachment, ATT00088.txt, that was 251 bytes in size. The attachment had only 3 lines. The first was the mailing list name, the next was the mailing list email address, and the last was the listinfo URL for the mailing list. She uses Outlook 2003 and this is apparently a problem that occurs with Mailman maling list messages received by Outlook users when a footer is added to messages, which is Mailman's default behavior. Apparently Mailman adds the footer as an attachment if the original message posted contains a message formatted in HTML MIME, or a text/plain MIME bodypart using a different character set than what Mailman would use for the footers.

To prevent the addition of a footer to messages, from the main mailman administration page for the list, I clicked on [Non-digest options] The text below appeared in the "Footer added to mail sent to regular list members" field.

_______________________________________________
%(real_name)s mailing list
%(real_name)s@%(host_name)s
%(web_page_url)slistinfo%(cgiext)s/%(_internal_name)s

The information listed has the following meaning.

msg_footer (nondigest): Footer added to mail sent to regular list members

Text appended to the bottom of every immediately-delivery message. This text can include Python format strings which are resolved against list attributes. The list of substitutions allowed are:

• real_name - The `pretty' name of the list; usually the list name with capitalization.
• list_name - The name by which the list is identified in URLs, where case is significant. (For backwards compability, _internal_name is equivalent.)
• host_name - The fully qualified domain name that the list server runs on.
• web_page_url - The base URL for Mailman. This can be appended with, e.g. listinfo/%(internal_name)s to yield the listinfo page for the mailing list.
• description - The brief description of the mailing list.
• info - The full description of the mailing list.
• cgiext - The extension added to CGI scripts.

Since the list owner did not want any footer being sent with messages, I removed all of the text from that field.

I also went to the digest options page and for the "Header added to every digest" field, I removed all of the text in that field.

References:

1. [Mailman-Users] Why are footers sent as attachments?
   Posted: January 29, 2006
   The Mailman-Users Archives
2. 4.39. HELP! Mailman is munging HTML & MIME-formatted messages before they are sent out? (problems with Mailman 2.1.x footers)
   Mailman FAQ Wizard

[/network/email/mailing_list/mailman] permanent link

Messages from Mailman Mailing List Appear From Listname-bounces

I set up a Mailman mailing list for a family member. When she receives messages from the list they are arriving with a "from" address of listname-bounces@listdomain.net On Behalf Of", with "listname" being the name of the mailing list, followed by the sender's address. She uses Outlook 2003 and sees this as the "from" address, but when the same messages arrive in a Hotmail account, the "from" address is the sender's email address. This behavior is apparently due to the fact that Mailman creates, among other message headers, a "Sender" header of the form "Sender: listname-bounces@listdomain". Some email clients, such as Outlook will place the contents of that "sender" header in the "from" field when they display the message.

By default, most email clients don't display the message headers, but if you view the message headers for a message, you will see the "sender" header that Mailman adds. Viewing Message Headers in Outlook 2002 explains how to view those headers in Outlook

References:

1. Why do posts appear to be from listname-bounces@mailman.u.washington.edu?
   Author: R. Skiver Thompson
   August 2004
   Frequently Asked Questions About Mailman
2. Viewing Message Headers in Outlook 2002
   December 16, 2004
   MoonPoint Support

[/network/email/mailing_list/mailman] permanent link

Email to Mailing List from 65.54.246.86 Rejected

I added a Hotmail email address to a mailing list for testing that mailing list. I found that messages from the Hotmail address were being bounced though, because the IP address of the sending Hotmail email server, 65.54.246.86, is in the Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System (SORBS) blocklist. SORBS is a DNS Blacklist (DNSBL). When I checked the SORBS list, it appeared that the 65.54.246.86 had been there for at least a week due to SORBS detecting spam orginating from the Hotmail email server at that address.

Database of servers sending to spamtrap addresses

Address:	65.54.246.87
Record Created:	Sat Aug 12 12:30:09 2006 GMT
Record Updated:	Fri Jun 1 19:30:05 2007 GMT
Additional Information:	[ Updated via: Spam 'o Matic ] Received: from bay0-omc1-s15.bay0.hotmail.com (bay0-omc1-s15.bay0.hotmail.com [65.54.246.87]) by desperado.sorbs.net (Postfix) with ESMTP id F0C6311466 for <[email]>; Sat, 02 Jun 2007 05:14:49 +1000 (EST)
Currently active and flagged to be published in DNS

I've been using SORBS as a blocklist for quite awhile, but I have encountered problems many times due to the fact that AOL, Hotmail, EarthLink, and email servers from some other large Internet Service Providers (ISPs) tend to get on the SORBS list frequently and stay there for a long time. I've contacted AOL and EarthLink support previously when I found one or more of their email servers were on the SORBS blocklist. I've found that, though the support personnel with which I communicated understand that their company employs blocklists or other means of blocking spam, they never seem to understand that other email providers may employ similar means. I've never been successful in getting the support personnel I've communicated with at AOL or EarthLink to take any action and usually it doesn't appear that they even understand the problem; I usually just get canned responses about how to stop their service from blocking email rather than any response indicating that they understand the problem is with email going from their systems to other systems (See SORBS Blocking AOL and EarthLink Servers and Report of SORBS listing to EarthLink).

I've found reports by others using SORBS of similar problems with email from Hotmail addresses (see Hotmail on sorbs?!?).

I understand that SORBS policy charging server owners to remove systems does drastically lessen the chances that systems will be removed quickly. I've considered removing the SORBS list from the blocklists I employ to reduce the deluge of spam in users' mailboxes, but it does block thousands of spam messages daily on my server, so I haven't taken that step yet. Usually, I add the sender's email address to the /etc/mail/access list used by Sendmail to keep email from particular senders being checked against the blocklists I employ.

In this case, though, I don't want any email addressed to the mailing list to be checked against a blocklist to preclude this problem. The Mailman mailing list software won't allow any email to the mailing list unless the "from" address is for a member of the mailing list, so I don't need the additional blocklist check.

Fortunately Sendmail, which is the software that handles email on the server, does allow you to specify that email to particular "to" addresses will always be accepted and won't be checked against DNSBL's. You can allow email to a particular address to bypass the blocklist checks by editing /etc/mail/access. Place a line similar to the following in that file:

To:jsmith@example.com         OK

The line above would ensure that email addressed to jsmith@example.com would not be checked against any blocklists employed on the email server.

After editing /etc/mail/access, you need to recreate the access database with a command similar to the following:

makemap hash /etc/mail/access </etc/mail/access

Once I added the mailing list address, I was able to send email to that address from the Hotmail account without worrying that the Hotmail email server used to transmit the messages might be on the SORBS blocklist or another blocklist I'm employing to limit spam.

References:

1. Spam and Open-Relay Blocking System
2. DNSBL
   Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3. SORBS Blocking AOL and EarthLink Servers
   April 23, 2006
   MoonPoint Support
4. Report of SORBS listing to EarthLink
   April 23, 2006
   MoonPoint Support
5. Hotmail on sorbs?!?
   Posted: September 21, 2005
   ReadList.com - Threaded Mailing List Reader
6. Sendmail cf/README - Anti-Spam Configuration Control
   sendmail.org

[/network/email/mailing_list] permanent link

Mailman Not Sending Welcome Message

I'm using Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager for a new mailing list. After creating a new mailing list through the web interface for mailman, I created aliases in /etc/aliases, which are shown below, for the list and ran the command newaliases.

## book_nook mailing list
book_nook:              "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman post book_nook"
book_nook-admin:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman admin book_nook"
book_nook-bounces:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman bounces book_nook"
book_nook-confirm:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman confirm book_nook"
book_nook-join:         "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman join book_nook"
book_nook-leave:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman leave book_nook"
book_nook-owner:        "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman owner book_nook"
book_nook-request:      "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman request book_nook"
book_nook-subscribe:    "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe book_nook"
book_nook-unsubscribe:  "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe book_nook"

I then added an email address to the list with the option to send a welcome message checked. But the welcome message was never sent. After doing a little checking, I discovered I needed to create a crontab entry for mailman ¹ .

On my RedHat Linux system, the file to be submitted for the cronjob is /var/mailman/cron/crontab.in, but may be in /usr/local/mailman/cron on other systems ²

At the end of the crontab.in file, I saw the following lines:

# At 3:27am every night, regenerate the gzip'd archive file.  Only
# turn this on if the internal archiver is used and
# GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES is false in mm_cfg.py
27 3 * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/nightly_gzip

There was no GZIP_ARCHIVE_TXT_FILES entry in /var/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py, so I commented out the entry in crontab.in. Since I don't need to gate news from a news server to mail, I also commented out the entry for that function by putting a "#" in front of it.

# Every 5 mins, try to gate news to mail.  You can comment this one out
# if you don't want to allow gating, or don't have any going on right now,
# or want to exclusively use a callback strategy instead of polling.
0,5,10,15,20,25,30,35,40,45,50,55 * * * * /usr/bin/python -S /var/mailman/cron/gate_news

I then submitted the cronjob for mailman with crontab -u mailman /var/mailman/cron/crontab.in.

References:

1. [Mailman-Users] Not sending password reminders, subscription confirmations
   By Helmut Schneider
   July 13, 2006
   mail.python.org Mailing Lists
2. Mailman - a mailing list manager
   The FreeBSD Diary

[/network/email/mailing_list/mailman] permanent link