[Mailman-Users] Passwords

[Willie McKemie]

After operating several mailman newsletters for several months, I just 
became aware that subscribers find unsubscribing a daunting task.  They 
can not do it without their password and they don't know their 
password.  They end up asking me, as list owner, to do it.  I am looking 
for ways to make it easier for them.  Newsletters go out about once a 
week and I do not wish to burden them with periodic password 
notification.  With my previous maillist software, I just told my 
potential subscribers (and unsubscribers) to put "subscribe" or 
"unsubscribe" in a message to <listname>-request@<domain>.  That worked 
very well for me and I would like mailman to operate as simply.  Here 
are the things I have thought of to deal with this mailman problem:

1) do away with all user passwords.  The FAQ tells me that that is not 
possible currently.

2) set all user passwords to the same and then make it public.  This 
seems to involve mailman configuration beyond my access.  I am the 
client of a hosting service and do not have the site password and I 
don't expect my host to be willing to spend much time on the problem.

3) send the user password in reply to an unsuccessful unsubscribe or 
help request and then tell them what to do with it.  Can anyone tell me 
how to do that?  

4) reply to a confirmation email.  It seems to me that the unsubscribe 
procedure could operate as simply and be as secure as the subscribe 
procedure.  That is, in response to a unsubsribe email, a reply 
required confirmation email could be sent to the subscriber's address.  
Is that feasible?

5) Anyone have any other ideas?

A few months ago, I posted here queries on several configuration 
issues; replies allowed me to get my footers straightened out get html 
posts rejected.  One outstanding issue is access to the subscriber 
lists.  With my previous maillist, I was able to ftp to and from my 
subscriber lists.  That gave me a sense of comfort, knowing that I was 
not completely dependent on my host.  I realize I can cut and paste 
each batch of 30 subscribers from the administration web interface, but 
I find that pretty tedious.  Help?

-- 
Willie  Time for a Kurdish state?
Are YOU an html abuser?  http://www.expita.com/nomime.html
Linux system uptime  153 days 18 hours 11 minutes