listadmin - process messages held by Mailman for approval

listadmin [-f configfile] [-t minutes] [listname]

listadmin is a textual alternative to Mailman's WWW interface for administering mailing lists.

-f configfile

Fetch list of mailing lists from configfile rather than the default (~/.listadmin.ini).

-t minutes

Stop processing after minutes has passed. Mostly useful for completely automated configurations of listadmin.

listname

Only process the lists matching listname. Specify a complete address, a substring or a regular expression.

The configuration file contains lines which can contain either a comment, a directive, or a mailing list address.

A line can be continued by putting a backslash character at the end of the line. Any leading whitespace on the following line is removed.

Comments begin with the character # and extend to the end of line. Backslash continuation is not applied to comments.

The argument to the directive can be put in double quotes to protect space characters. Inside double quotes, \" can be used to include a literal double quote, and \\ for a literal backslash.

A directive affects all the mailing lists addresses which follow after it in the configuration file. The directives are:

username username

Specifies the username to use for authentication.

password password

Specifies the password to use for authentication.

adminurl url

The URL for maintaining Mailman requests. Some substitutions are performed: (examples below refer to the hypothetical list foo-devel@example.net)

{list}

The local part of the list name, e.g., "foo-devel".

{domain}

The domain part of the list name, e.g., "example.net".

{subdomain}

The first component of the domain part, e.g., "example".

default action

Specifies the action to take when the user presses just Return. Available actions are:

approve

The message will be sent to all member of the list.

reject

Notify sender that the message was rejected.

discard

Throw message away, don't notify sender.

skip

Don't decide now, leave it for later.

none

Reset to no default action.

action action

This action will be taken for all messages where none of the other rules apply (e.g., spamlevel, discard_if_from etc.), ie., whenever the user would have been asked what to do. The same actions as for default are available, although reject isn't very useful.

spamlevel number

This specifies the threshold for automatic discard of suspected spam messages. 12 is unlikely to have false positives. No user confirmation is needed, so it is best to play it safe. Less than 5 is not recommended.

not_spam_if_from pattern

If the message's From header matches the pattern, all automatic actions will be cancelled and you will be asked what action to take explicitly. The pattern can use Perl regexp syntax. If enclosed in slashes, some modifiers can be added, a typical example being /pattern/i to match case-insensitively.

not_spam_if_subject pattern

As above, but matches against the Subject header.

discard_if_from pattern

If the message's From header matches the pattern, it will be discarded automatically.

discard_if_subject pattern

As above, but matches against the Subject header.

discard_if_reason pattern

As above, but matches against Mailman's reason for holding the message for approval.

subscription_default action

Specifies the action to take when the user presses just Return while processing subscriptions. Available actions are:

accept

The new subscriber will be added.

reject

Notify sender that s/he was not allowed to join the list.

skip

Don't decide now, leave it for later.

none

Reset to no default action.

subscription_action action

This action will be taken always for all new subscribers in the relevant lists, no user interaction will take place. The same actions as for subscription_default are available, although only skip is very useful. It is better to get automatic accept and reject behaviour by changing the Mailman configuration.

confirm yes|no

Before submitting changes, ask for confirmation. Default is "yes".

log filename

Changes submitted to the web interface are logged. All the changes for one list are sent in batches at the end of processing. The format in the log is first a line containing the list name and a time stamp in local time. Then one line for each message, in the format

action D:[date] F:[sender] S:[subject]

This batch of lines are terminated by a line saying changes sent to server.

The filename none turns off logging.

The user interface to listadmin is line oriented with single letter commands. By pressing Return, the default action is chosen. The default action is printed in brackets in the prompt. The available actions are:

a

Approve sending the message to all members of the list.

r

Reject the message and notify sender of the decision.

d

Discard the message silently, don't notify sender.

s

Skip the message, leave its status as pending unchanged.

b

View Body, display the first 20 lines of the message.

f

View Full, display the complete message, including headers.

number

Jump forward or backward to message number.

/pattern

Search (case-insensitively) for the next message with matching From or Subject. If pattern is left out, the previous value will be used.

?pattern

As above, but backwards.

q

Quit processing this list and go on to the next.

Changes will not take effect until the end of the list has been reached. At that time, the user will be prompted whether the changes should be submitted to Mailman (see also "confirm" directive above).

An example configuration file:

	# A comment, it must appear on a line by itself.
	#
	# Settings affect all lists being listed after it.

username jdoe password Geheim default discard # This one works for Sourceforge: adminurl http://{domain}/lists/admindb/{list}

slartibartfast@lists.sourceforge.net

# This is how the default Mailman URLs look: adminurl http://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}

# If the password contains quotes or spaces, you may need # to put it in quotes. A complex example: password "\"lise\\ "

# These lists will still use the username [jdoe], but the # password is now ["lise\ ].

default approve discard_if_reason "Message has implicit|Too many recipients" discard_if_from ^(postmaster|mailer(-daemon)?|listproc|no-reply)@

foo-devel@example.net

# No one should ever send e-mail to the next list, so throw it # all away, without asking any questions action discard confirm no foo-announce@example.net

$HOME/.listadmin.ini

The default configuration file.

The SpamAssassin score is fetched from the header X-Spam-Level, the value is the number of asterisks following. It will also check a header specific to the University of Oslo. If this does not match your setup, you will need to change the Perl code. I'd be interested in ideas on how to best make this configurable.

The HTML parser is quite fragile and depends on Mailman not to change the format of its generated code.

Mailman 2.1 is not supported.

ISO 8859-1 environment is assumed.

Kjetil T. Homme <kjetilho+listadmin@ifi.uio.no>