[Mailman-Users] Extracting e-mail addresses from a dead machine

[Mark Sapiro]

Dragon wrote:

>Mark Sapiro sent the message below at 07:48 12/12/2007:
>
>>If you did have access to a Mailman installation, you could run
>>Mailman's bin/dumpdb against the config.pck which would produce output
>>easier to deal with, or you could create a lists/<listname>/ directory
>>in that installation, put the config.pck in it and run
>>"bin/list_members -f -p <listname>"
>---------------- End original message. ---------------------
>
>Is it really necessary to have a fully functioning Mailman 
>installation to do this?
>
>Would it not be sufficient to have Python installed, a copy of the 
>dumpdb script and the config.pck file?


Nope. There are two issues. The first is that there are imports of
Mailman modules in dumpdb. The 'import paths' which among other things
inserts the path to mailman in sys.path so that Mailman modules can be
imported needs to be removed if there is no paths module or path to
the Mailman installation. There is also a 'from Mailman.i18n import _'
which can be replaced with

def _(s):
    return s

If you do those things, the dumpdb script will run, but then you will
likely encounter the second issue. The config.pck probably contains
instances of the _BounceInfo class defined in Mailman/Bouncer.py. If
so, the unpickling needs to import that module to understand the
_BounceInfo class instances. So you need that module plus everything
it imports, etc.

I.e. you need pretty much a whole Mailman installation.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan