Mailman Infrastructure SOP

Contact Information

Owner: Fedora Infrastructure Team
Contact: #fedora-admin, sysadmin-main, sysadmin-tools, sysadmin-hosted
Location: phx2
Servers: mailman01, mailman02, mailman01.stg
Purpose: Provides mailing list services.

Description

Mailing list services for Fedora projects are located on the mailman01.phx2.fedoraproject.org server.

Common Tasks

Creating a new mailing list

Log into mailman01
sudo -u mailman mailman3 create <listname>@lists.fedora(project|hosted).org --owner <username>@fedoraproject.org --notify

Important

Please make sure to add a valid description to the newly created list. (to avoid [no description available] on listinfo index)

Removing content from archives

We don’t.

It’s not easy to remove content from the archives and it’s generally useless as well because the archives are often mirrored by third parties as well as being in the INBOXs of all of the people on the mailing list at that time. Here’s an example message to send to someone who requests removal of archived content:

Greetings,

We're sorry to say that we don't remove content from the mailing list archives.
Doing so is a non-trivial amount of work and usually doesn't achieve anything
because the content has already been disseminated to a wide audience that we do
not control.  The emails have gone out to all of the subscribers of the mailing
list at that time and also (for a great many of our lists) been copied by third
parties (for instance: http://markmail.org and http://gmane.org).

Sorry we cannot help further,

 Mailing lists and their owners

Checking Membership

Are you in need of checking who owns a certain mailing list without having to search around on list’s frontpages?

Mailman has a nice tool that will help us list members by type.

Get a full list of all the mailing lists hosted on the server:

sudo -u mailman mailman3 lists

Get the list of regular members for example@example.com:

sudo -u mailman mailman3 members example@example.com

Get the list of owners for example@example.com:

sudo -u mailman mailman3 members -R owner example@example.com

Get the list of moderators for example@example.com:

sudo -u mailman mailman3 members -R moderator example@example.com

Troubleshooting and Resolution

List Administration

Specific users are marked as 'site admins' in the database.

Please file a issue if you feel you need to have this access.

Restart Procedure

If the server needs to be restarted mailman should come back on it’s own. Otherwise each service on it can be restarted:

sudo service mailman3 restart
sudo service postfix restart

How to delete a mailing list

Delete a list, but keep the archives:

sudo -u mailman mailman3 remove <listname>