[Mailman-Users] unsubscribe one user from many lists

Wed May 16 02:37:54 CEST 2012

Hi Mailmen and -women,

I'd like to administrate some ~20 email lists of a team of people 
working together via mailman. Once a user leaves the team, I should 
unsubscribe this user from all lists that he's on. How do I do this 
without having to click through 20 web interfaces?

First I thought, hey, I simply send an unsubscribe email, just like the 
subscribe email. Well, that doesn't work though, since unsubscription 
always requires the user password, which I don't have of course. So I 
searched around and found this thread:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-July/037815.html

about exactly this. Now, that suggests a global change by patching a 
python script. But since the mail server I'm using is actually for a 
whole institute, the administrator probably has little interest to 
globally change his Mailman/Commands/cmd_unsubscribe.py just because of 
my 20 mailing lists, in particular since some of his other lists may be 
more security sensitive than mine. In addition, if I try to patch this 
file rather than having some patch from somebody who actually knows 
python ;-) he probably won't like it anyway...

So I continued searching and stumbled across the possibility of doing 
this via wget:

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-December/041214.html

and

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-December/041220.html

Wow, that would be fantastic! :-) I could simply shell script that, not 
even worrying whether the user is subscribed to all 20 lists and just 
batch-unsubscribe (if the user wouldn't be on a given list, nothing 
would happen, so that's OK) Now, I'm not super sure I got the command 
line right, this is what I tried:

wget --post-data="adminpw=foobar&unsubscribees=me at somewhere.edu" 
http://serveraddress/mailman/admin/mailinglistname/members/members/remove

and I also tried to directly enter

http://serveraddress/mailman/admin/mailinglistname/members/members/remove?adminpw=foobar&unsubscribees=me@somewhere.edu

into my browser. In both cases what I got back was:

<head><title>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.9</title></head>
<body bgcolor=#ffffff><h2>Bug in Mailman version 2.1.9</h2>
<p><h3>We're sorry, we hit a bug!</h3>

<p>Please inform the webmaster for this site of this
problem.  Printing of traceback and other system information has been
explicitly inhibited, but the webmaster can find this information in the
Mailman error logs.

and now I'm lost :-\ Can somebody help me? How can I unsubscribe a given 
user from a couple of mailing lists at the same time without having to 
go through the clumsy web interface for each of the mailing lists?

Your help is greatly appreciated - thank you very much!

Kind regards,
Rafael