Revision as of 15:43, 14 November 2007

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).

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.
Set generic_nonmember_action on the Privacy->Sender filters tab to reject as most lists are not actively administered so we prefer to reject rather than holding posts from unsubscribed folks.
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]"
Be sure to choose a name that does not already have an existing alias, such as: sales, support, www, security. If you need to use one of these names someone will have to edit the /etc/aliases file for you manually.

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

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.
List setting policies. Do we want to mandate more policies than the ones listed above as "Notes for List Administrators"?
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

Migrate

When migrating from another system to osgeo, get the .mbox files, and the whole /var/lib/mailman/lists/<listname> directory, and follow roughly the following steps as root (or sudo each step):

  # newlist -q grass-announce warmerdam@pobox.com junk 
  # cd /var/lib/mailman/lists/grass-announce
  # cp ~warmerdam/grass-announce/* . 
  # withlist -l -r fix_url grass-announce
  # /usr/lib/mailman/bin/arch grass-announce ~warmerdam/grass-announce.mbox
  # chown -R mailman.mailman /var/lib/mailman/lists/grass-announce
  # chown -R mailman.mailman /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/grass-announce*
  # genaliases
  # /sbin/service postfix restart
  # mailmanctl restart

If the list name on the new system is different than on the old system, it may be prudent to fix this up on the mail page of the web admin interface after the withlist command has been used, and before the archives are imported. (FrankW)

References

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

Difference between revisions of "SAC:Mailing Lists"