NAME¶
listadmin - process messages held by Mailman for approval
SYNOPSIS¶
listadmin [-?] [-V] [-f configfile] [-t minutes] [--mail]
[--nomail] [{-a|-r} file] [--add-member address]
[--remove-member address] [-l] [listname]
DESCRIPTION¶
listadmin is a textual alternative to Mailman's WWW interface for
administering mailing lists.
OPTIONS¶
- -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.
- --mail
- Addresses added as subscribers will have nomail
turned off.
- --nomail
- Addresses added as subscribers will have nomail
turned on.
- -a file
- Add e-mail addresses listed in file (one address per
line) to the subscriber list. The welcome message is suppressed.
- --add-member address
- Add address to the subscriber list, works as
above.
- -r file
- Remove e-mail addresses listed in file (one address
per line) from the subscriber list.
- --remove-member address
- Remove address from the subscriber list.
- -l
- Display the subscriber list.
- listname
- Only process the lists matching listname. Specify a
complete address, a substring or a regular expression.
- -? or --help
- Display short usage description.
- -V or --version
- Output version number.
CONFIGURATION SYNTAX¶
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.
DIRECTIVES¶
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. (Not all
Mailman servers require a username.)
- 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.
- spamheader header-name
- The name of the header which contains the spam score. It is
assumed that the score is encoded as a sequence of characters, like
"*****" for the value 5. By default it will look for all headers
with names containing "spam" and "score" or
"level", and pick the highest score if there is more than one.
Setting the header-name to default will restore this
behaviour.
- 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".
- unprintable questionmark|unicode
- If the subject or sender address contains characters the
terminal can't display, they will be replaced by either
"<?>" (in questionmark mode, the default) or
something like "<U+86a8>" (in unicode mode).
- 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 is terminated by a line saying
changes sent to server.
- The same substitutions are performed on filename as
on the argument to adminurl. Tilde syntax can be used to refer to
home directories. The filename none turns off logging.
- meta_member_support yes|no
- Meta members are an experimental feature at the University
of Oslo. This option is enabled by default for lists in uio.no, and is
needed to avoid clearing the list of meta members when manipulating the
list of ordinary members. Note: Requires additional Perl module
WWW::Mechanize
INTERACTIVE USE¶
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.
- t
- View Time, display the Date header from the message.
- number
- Jump forward or backward to message number.
- u
- Go back to the previous message and undo the last approve,
discard or reject action.
- /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.
- .
- Redisplay information about current message.
- add
- Add address as subscriber to the list. If
address is left out, use the sender of the current message.
- nomail
- As add, but adds address with
"nomail" enabled.
- list
- List subscriber addresses matching pattern, or the
full list if no pattern is specified.
- rem
- Remove address from the subscriber list. Note: there
is no undo for this action.
- 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).
EXAMPLES¶
To process only the lists of a single domain, specify the domain as the pattern:
listadmin example.com
To disable the printing of characters outside US-ASCII, set the locale
appropriately:
env LC_CTYPE=C listadmin
An example configuration file:
# A comment, it must appear on a line by itself.
#
# Settings affect all lists being listed after it.
username jdoe@example.com
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
ENVIRONMENT¶
- http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY
- Specifies a proxy to use for HTTP.
- https_proxy or HTTPS_PROXY
- Specifies a proxy to use for HTTPS.
- LC_CTYPE
- The character set support is deduced from this variable.
FILES¶
$HOME/.listadmin.ini
The default configuration file.
BUGS¶
The HTML parser is quite fragile and depends on Mailman not to change the format
of its generated code.
An extra blank line is sometimes added to the subject when it contains double
width characters (e.g. Chinese). This is probably a bug in Text::Reform.
AUTHOR¶
Kjetil T. Homme <kjetilho+listadmin@ifi.uio.no>
