[Mailman-Users] Mailman admin question

[Ognen Duzlevski]

On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> Ognen Duzlevski wrote:
> >
> >I have not played much with mailman but I am curious about something. I
> >inherited a machine that runs mailman and one of the lists is setup
> through
> >postfix aliases to do the following:
> >
> >blah-subscribe /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe blah
> >blah-join /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join blah
>
>
> Actually, I suspect those aliases look like
>
> blah-subscribe: "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe blah"
> blah-join: "|/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join blah"
>
>
> >How do I find out what "mailman join blah" resolves to? I guess my
> question
> >is ultimately - where do I look to find out who gets the join and
> subscribe
> >requests?
>
>
> The MTA processes that alias by piping the message to say 'blah-join'
> to the command '/usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman join blah'.
> /usr/lib/mailman/mail/mailman is a wrapper which will ultimately
> deliver the message in this case to a script named (probably)
> /usr/lib/mailman/scripts/join which in turn will queue the message for
> Mailman's CommandRunner which will ultimately process the subscription
> request.
>
>
> >For fun I subscribed to the "blah" list and never received a
> >reply. I looked at the mail logs on the same machine and found an entry
> >along the lines of:
> >
> >Apr 19 20:19:07 (242320 blah: pending <name> <email> <ip>
>
>
> That specific entry looks like an entry from Mailman's 'subscribe' log
> which says the subscription request for the blah list was received via
> the web from <ip> and a confirmation request was sent to <email> and
> Mailman is waiting for the user to confirm. If in fact it had an IP
> address, it resulted from a web subscribe and had nothing to do with
> an email to blah-join.
>
> If you didn't receive the confirmation request, check the MTA logs to
> see what happened to it.
>
> Also, check the MTA logs to see what happened to the mail to blah-join.
>
>
> >There are a bunch of lines below mentioning other users subscribing to the
> >same list and their requests being approved.
> >
> >I realize each machine can be set up differently to process mail but
> >ultimately I am curious as to what mailman join <list name> actually does.
>
>
> As described above, it causes Mailman to process the message as a
> request from the sender to join <list name>.
>
> --
> Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
> San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan
>
>
Mark,

Thank you very much for the detailed reply - this is exactly what I was
looking for!

Ognen