[Mailman-Users] Unsubscribe without passwords [was So all you people that wanted autoreject...]

[Gergely Soros]

From: "Satya" <satyap at satya.virtualave.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 21, 2001 2:54 AM

> >[...] many people are sending their 
> >messages to listname-unsubscribe at domain from a different address than
> >what they are subscribed as. Of course they don't auto-receive any feedback
> >when the action has failed, only the mail user receives Mailman's standard 
> >"problems with the email commands" message. As a temp solution I'm 
> 
> This happens with my Perl mailman wrapper?

No, with the shell script, gotta reinstall your Perl wrapper to see how it reacts...

> 
> >of the list post mail...). Anyway, the dream-unsubscribe-script would first 
> >check the list db, if the addrss is there, send the confirm message otherwise
> >send one with the instructions. I know this could get difficult and probably 
> >involve too much work, pls tell me your thoughts.
> 
> This is simple enough, we can use bin/list_members and search that. The
> problem lies in getting access to the data. mailman home directory has
> permissions which are too loose for procmail. No other user has the
> permissions to access the list config files.
> 
> One could have a mailman-owned cron job put all that data into a database,
> and the scripts can then read the data from there.

Actually we do have a root-owned daily cron job that dumps members of all lists
to files for backup, we could duplicate these files and chown them so the Perl 
script can either copy the members to MySQL or grep the files in realtime when
a request arrives (this can take awhile with lists of 10.000 ??). The MySQL solution
is probably safer, we can lock the db when updating the lists. Interesting!

By the way, am I the only person on Earth with list members who are having
trouble using the passwords to unsubscribe? Or am I the only one who got tired
of manually unsubscribing these problem users?

Gergely