[Mailman-Users] Migrating a list to a new email address

[Bill Christensen]

Hi all,

I have a long running list with thousands of subscribers that needs to 
move to a new set of email addresses.

The existing list is announce-only, so doesn't get a whole lot of 
traffic - typically at most a few outgoing emails a year.  But some time 
back a bot started sending spam registrations via hits to the web server 
in the form

      <domain name> 
/mailman/subscribe.cgi/bwbnewsletter?email=<bogus_registrant>@<somedomain.tld><mailto:ruanwei12 at hotmail.com>&fullname=&pw=123456789&pw-conf=123456789&language=en&digest=0&email-button=Subscribe. 


I long ago routed real users to an alternative signup, but the spam 
keeps coming, unrelenting, and are now anywhere between 1k and 10k per day.

I'm thinking that the best way to deal with this is to move everything, 
including the archives, to a newly created list on the same domain 
name.  The alternative signup method i've set up works, so if i set the 
new list to "Advertise this list..." = NO in Privacy, I'm hoping the 
spammers won't figure out that the new mailman list exists.  I could 
also set it up as a closed list if that's possible since the new 
registrations will be entered manually in bulk, though I don't see any 
settings which disallow all subscriptions.

So I'd like confirmation on how to move a list to a new address under 
the same domain.  I figure I need to:

1) take a backup copy of the <oldlistname>.mbox file in /archives/private

2) take a copy of the current subscriber list (already done using the 
list_members command)

3) create the new list, aliases, etc and associated email addresses

4) remove /archives/private/<newlistname>.mbox

5) rename <oldlistname>.mbox to <newlistname>.mbox

     5b) do I need to replace all instances of <oldlistname> with 
<newlistname> everywhere they occur in the .mbox file? Would doing so 
cause any problems?

6) rebuild the archives

7) test the new list

8) bulk subscribe the subscriber list to <newlistname>

9) delete the old list

Did I miss anything?

Thanks in advance.