SAC:Mailing Lists

Mailing lists are administered with Mailman on the virtual host lists.osgeo.org. Physically this is the main Peer1 host (same as www.osgeo.org). Currently (Jan 2007) all administration is done by ShawnB, but ultimately SAC needs to be able to take care of them.

Notes for List Administrators

All lists

• Please set "A terse phrase identifying this list." to something brief and meaningful as this is what is shown on the main lists directory. It is on the General tab.
• Set "Who can view subscription list?" on the Privacy tab to "List Admin Only", otherwise anyone can subscribe and then harvest the mailing list.
• Ensure the "Prefix for subject line of list postings." on the General tab is set to something meaningful. If the list name is generic (such as "announce") it may be helpful to prefix it with OSGeo-, eg. "[OSGeo-Announce]"

Other options

• For announce lists (ie. moderated lists) turn on "Emergency moderation of all list traffic" on. It is on the General tab.

Outstanding Issues

1. Administrator/moderator permissions. Currently this is a hodgepodge. Some administrators have set the passwords but then others can't help administrate the list. The default admin password is not very secure. It has been suggested that we use some sort of LDAP/http authentication to verify that folks trying to do list admin are in some sort of mail administration group.
2. List setting policies. Do we want to mandate more policies than the ones listed above as "Notes for List Administrators"?
3. Search. Do we want to do anything special to enable searching the archive? Jason has setup an OSGeo.org grouping on nabble (http://www.nabble.com/OSGeo.org-f18127.html) that makes searching all osgeo related mailing lists effective. We might want to expand on that.

System Tasks

New Lists

• Create a new list through the web admin login, it will show you an error, but the list has been created.
• Then run the following before it will allow any email to be received to the list:

# sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases

• Restarting or reloading postfix is also recommended:

# sudo /sbin/service postfix restart

Renaming Lists

• create new list

  $sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist listname admins@email lists_passwd

• move original lists archive to newlists archive location

  $ sudo cp /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/oldlist/oldlist.mbox/oldlist.mbox \
    /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/newlist/newlist.mbox/

• create archive

  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch --wipe newlist

• export subscribers from old list regular and digest members

  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -r oldlistname > listname-regular.txt
  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members -d oldlistname > listname-digest.txt

• import subscribers into new list

  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members --regular-members=listname-regular.txt --welcome-msg=y newlistname
  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/add_members --digest-members=listname-digest.txt --welcome-msg=y newlistname

• remove old list

  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist oldlistname

• update aliases and check that proper permissions are set

  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases
  $ sudo /usr/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms -f

• edit postfix aliases - /etc/aliases

  oldlist:               newlist@lists.osgeo.org
  oldlist-request:       newlist-request@lists.osgeo.org
  oldlist-admin:         newlist-admin@lists.osgeo.org
  oldlist-owner:         newlist-owner@lists.osgeo.org

• update postfix with new aliases

  $ sudo /usr/bin/newaliases
  $ sudo /sbin/service postfix reload

References

• Here is another approach to renaming, though our web admin interface won't actually allow you to do the final rename step