[Mailman-Users] Mailman Question

[Jon Carnes]

On Mon, 2003-07-28 at 16:47, Steven Poulakos wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have posted to the [LO] lo at listowner.org mailing list about the 
> question below two times (about 1 month ago and again last Friday) and 
> hadn't received a response.  I'm getting in a time crunch to find a 
> solution.  So, if you could please provide me with any advice, I would 
> really appreciate it.
> 
> Here's the question:
> 
> I would like to allow a listowner to subscribe/unsubscribe users by 
> sending emails to Mailman.   Those emails would come from the list 
> owner's email address and contain a password if needed.  I would then 
> like to do the following actions:
> 
> 1.  Subscribe (not invite) the user
> 2.  Not send a welcome message
> 
> 3.  Unsubscribe the user
> 
I think the best way to do this is write a script that is attached to a
special email address for the list.  

  <listname>-admin_unsub: "|/var/local/mm/hack/admin_unsub <listname>"

The email address to access the script is <listname>-admin_unsub.
In this case the name of the script would be admin_unsub.
The script is stored in the directory /var/local/mm/hack/..
The first command line input to the script is the list's name.

The list admin sends an email to the address <listname>-admin_unsub with
the list password (or simply a general password for using the app) and
the email address to be unsubscribed.
This information is dumped to your script, then your script runs the
Mailman commands to add a user (without a welcome message) to your
bye-bye list, then it also runs the commands to unsubscribe the user
from their current list.

I've been doing scripts like that for years - they are a piece of cake
to write.  These days, I find it easier to write the scripts as a cgi,
it takes just a tiny bit more of formating to get done, but it's easier
for the list admins (and they sort of expect that sort of thing from
Mailman).

There are some tricks that make this easier, using sudo is one of them.
One of my old favorites, is to copy the bash executable to a secure
location (only reachable via your script) and then SetGID for it to run
as Mailman, then have your scripts use that as the shell.

Have fun!

Jon Carnes