NAME
listadmin - process messages held by Mailman for approval
SYNOPSIS
listadmin [-?] [-V] [-f configfile] [-t minutes] [--mail] [--nomail]
[{-a|-r} file] [--add-member address] [--remove-member address] [-l]
[listname]
DESCRIPTION
listadmin is a textual alternative to Mailman’s WWW interface for
administering mailing lists.
OPTIONS
-f configfile
Fetch list of mailing lists from configfile rather than the
default (~/.listadmin.ini).
-t minutes
Stop processing after minutes has passed. Mostly useful for
completely automated configurations of listadmin.
--mail Addresses added as subscribers will have nomail turned off.
--nomail
Addresses added as subscribers will have nomail turned on.
-a file
Add e-mail addresses listed in file (one address per line) to
the subscriber list. The welcome message is suppressed.
--add-member address
Add address to the subscriber list, works as above.
-r file
Remove e-mail addresses listed in file (one address per line)
from the subscriber list.
--remove-member address
Remove address from the subscriber list.
-l Display the subscriber list.
listname
Only process the lists matching listname. Specify a complete
address, a substring or a regular expression.
-? or --help
Display short usage description.
-V or --version
Output version number.
CONFIGURATION SYNTAX
The configuration file contains lines which can contain either a
comment, a directive, or a mailing list address.
A line can be continued by putting a backslash character at the end of
the line. Any leading whitespace on the following line is removed.
Comments begin with the character # and extend to the end of line.
Backslash continuation is not applied to comments.
The argument to the directive can be put in double quotes to protect
space characters. Inside double quotes, \" can be used to include a
literal double quote, and \\ for a literal backslash.
DIRECTIVES
A directive affects all the mailing lists addresses which follow after
it in the configuration file. The directives are:
username username
Specifies the username to use for authentication. (Not
all Mailman servers require a username.)
password password
Specifies the password to use for authentication.
adminurl url
The URL for maintaining Mailman requests. Some
substitutions are performed: (examples below refer to the
hypothetical list foo-devel@example.net)
{list} The local part of the list name, e.g., "foo-
devel".
{domain}
The domain part of the list name, e.g.,
"example.net".
{subdomain}
The first component of the domain part, e.g.,
"example".
default action
Specifies the action to take when the user presses just
Return. Available actions are:
approve
The message will be sent to all member of the
list.
reject Notify sender that the message was rejected.
discard
Throw message away, don’t notify sender.
skip Don’t decide now, leave it for later.
none Reset to no default action.
action action
This action will be taken for all messages where none of
the other rules apply (e.g., spamlevel, discard_if_from
etc.), ie., whenever the user would have been asked what
to do. The same actions as for default are available,
although reject isn’t very useful.
spamlevel number
This specifies the threshold for automatic discard of
suspected spam messages. 12 is unlikely to have false
positives. No user confirmation is needed, so it is best
to play it safe. Less than 5 is not recommended.
spamheader header-name
The name of the header which contains the spam score. It
is assumed that the score is encoded as a sequence of
characters, like "*****" for the value 5. By default it
will look for all headers with names containing "spam"
and "score" or "level", and pick the highest score if
there is more than one. Setting the header-name to
default will restore this behaviour.
not_spam_if_from pattern
If the message’s From header matches the pattern, all
automatic actions will be cancelled and you will be asked
what action to take explicitly. The pattern can use Perl
regexp syntax. If enclosed in slashes, some modifiers
can be added, a typical example being /pattern/i to match
case-insensitively.
not_spam_if_subject pattern
As above, but matches against the Subject header.
discard_if_from pattern
If the message’s From header matches the pattern, it will
be discarded automatically.
discard_if_subject pattern
As above, but matches against the Subject header.
discard_if_reason pattern
As above, but matches against Mailman’s reason for
holding the message for approval.
subscription_default action
Specifies the action to take when the user presses just
Return while processing subscriptions. Available actions
are:
accept The new subscriber will be added.
reject Notify sender that s/he was not allowed to join
the list.
skip Don’t decide now, leave it for later.
none Reset to no default action.
subscription_action action
This action will be taken always for all new subscribers
in the relevant lists, no user interaction will take
place. The same actions as for subscription_default are
available, although only skip is very useful. It is
better to get automatic accept and reject behaviour by
changing the Mailman configuration.
confirm yes|no
Before submitting changes, ask for confirmation. Default
is "yes".
unprintable questionmark|unicode
If the subject or sender address contains characters the
terminal can’t display, they will be replaced by either
"<?>" (in questionmark mode, the default) or something
like "<U+86a8>" (in unicode mode).
log filename
Changes submitted to the web interface are logged. All
the changes for one list are sent in batches at the end
of processing. The format in the log is first a line
containing the list name and a time stamp in local time.
Then one line for each message, in the format
action D:[date] F:[sender] S:[subject]
This batch of lines is terminated by a line saying
changes sent to server.
The same substitutions are performed on filename as on
the argument to adminurl. Tilde syntax can be used to
refer to home directories. The filename none turns off
logging.
meta_member_support yes|no
Meta members are an experimental feature at the
University of Oslo. This option is enabled by default
for lists in uio.no, and is needed to avoid clearing the
list of meta members when manipulating the list of
ordinary members. Note: Requires additional Perl module
WWW::Mechanize
INTERACTIVE USE
The user interface to listadmin is line oriented with single letter
commands. By pressing Return, the default action is chosen. The
default action is printed in brackets in the prompt. The available
actions are:
a Approve sending the message to all members of the list.
r Reject the message and notify sender of the decision.
d Discard the message silently, don’t notify sender.
s Skip the message, leave its status as pending unchanged.
b View Body, display the first 20 lines of the message.
f View Full, display the complete message, including
headers.
t View Time, display the Date header from the message.
number Jump forward or backward to message number.
u Go back to the previous message and undo the last
approve, discard or reject action.
/pattern
Search (case-insensitively) for the next message with
matching From or Subject. If pattern is left out, the
previous value will be used.
?pattern
As above, but backwards.
. Redisplay information about current message.
add Add address as subscriber to the list. If address is
left out, use the sender of the current message.
nomail As add, but adds address with "nomail" enabled.
list List subscriber addresses matching pattern, or the full
list if no pattern is specified.
rem Remove address from the subscriber list. Note: there is
no undo for this action.
q Quit processing this list and go on to the next.
Changes will not take effect until the end of the list has been
reached. At that time, the user will be prompted whether the changes
should be submitted to Mailman (see also "confirm" directive above).
EXAMPLES
To process only the lists of a single domain, specify the domain as the
pattern:
listadmin example.com
To disable the printing of characters outside US-ASCII, set the locale
appropriately:
env LC_CTYPE=C listadmin
An example configuration file:
# A comment, it must appear on a line by itself.
#
# Settings affect all lists being listed after it.
username jdoe@example.com
password Geheim
default discard
# This one works for Sourceforge:
adminurl http://{domain}/lists/admindb/{list}
slartibartfast@lists.sourceforge.net
# This is how the default Mailman URLs look:
adminurl http://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
# If the password contains quotes or spaces, you may need
# to put it in quotes. A complex example:
password "\"lise\\ "
# These lists will still use the username [jdoe], but the
# password is now ["lise\ ].
default approve
discard_if_reason "Message has implicit|Too many recipients"
discard_if_from ^(postmaster|mailer(-daemon)?|listproc|no-reply)@
foo-devel@example.net
# No one should ever send e-mail to the next list, so throw it
# all away, without asking any questions
action discard
confirm no
foo-announce@example.net
ENVIRONMENT
http_proxy or HTTP_PROXY
Specifies a proxy to use for HTTP.
https_proxy or HTTPS_PROXY
Specifies a proxy to use for HTTPS.
LC_CTYPE
The character set support is deduced from this variable.
FILES
$HOME/.listadmin.ini
The default configuration file.
BUGS
The HTML parser is quite fragile and depends on Mailman not to change
the format of its generated code.
An extra blank line is sometimes added to the subject when it contains
double width characters (e.g. Chinese). This is probably a bug in
Text::Reform.
AUTHOR
Kjetil T. Homme <kjetilho+listadmin@ifi.uio.no>
24 Feb 2005