[Mailman-Users] Usubscribing a bunch of people

[Simon White]

12-Jan-04 at 12:58, Svante Pettersson (svante at thehighwaystar.com) wrote :
> I run a mailing list with 10215 members. Every month when we send out our 
> announcements to this list, we get 40 or 50 bounces from address that are 
> over quota or has ceased to exist and so on. You know the drill. 
> Unsubscribing these people is hell with Mailman since you have to do it 
> with the web interface, one at the time. It takes a while, to say the 
> least. Is there another way that I haven't found? I think I have done all 
> homework so far, checking the documentation, the mail list archives and all 
> that. Some old replies to this list suggest there isn't another way (unless 
> you have access to the server in another way, which I don't) but I thought 
> maybe someone had figured something out after those mails.

Command line tools can do unsubscribes. Bounces should be treated
automatically but low volume bounce detection doesn't work too well, it
tends to be a bit conservative about when to unsubscribe.

There are some scripts I wrote available here:

http://mediadev.homelinux.net/mailman.html

Also, you can certainly mass unsubscribe via the web interface, one
address per line (I think). If that's the only access you have, this
*is* available on the list admin pages.

I also have a PERL script modified from somewhere which can treat a
mailbox full of bounces and produce a report suitable for unsubscribing
from Mailman or exporting to CSV for import to a DB / Excel. I might get
around to putting that online sometime too if anybody would have a use
for it. We use it for processing bounces for automatic unsubscribes
here.

Regards,

-- 
Simon White. Internet Consultant, Linux/Windows Server Administration.
email, dns and web servers; php javascript perl asp; MySQL MSSQL Access
     Bridging the gap between management, HR and the tech team.