Mailman How-Tos

Some basic tasks are listed below to help avoid having to search on the random times requests are made:

For all of these instructions, you'll need to figure out where your mailman installation is located. Usually it'll be /usr/lib/mailman or /usr/local/lib/mailman, but it could be elsewhere depending on how it was installed. All references to bin/* or ./bin/* will assume your PWD is in the mailman path.

Change List Ownership

You'll probably want to check the existing list owners with ./bin/list_owners <list-name>.

Once you've confirmed the owners and that a change needs to be made, you can create a temporary file with the new list owners. The temp file assigns the list of owners email addresses to an owner variable in Python format, so whatever you enter in this file needs to be valid Python. Below is a simple example of a file that assigns alice@_example.com and bob@_example.com to the owner variable:

owner = ['alice@_example.com', 'bob@_example.com']

Once this file has been created, you can use it with the mailman config_list command to update the list owners. You can supply the new owners list file to config_list with the -i argument and then the owner filename. You will also need to include the list name in the argument list after that. Ie. config_list -i myfile mylist. As a more concrete example, let's say we created /tmp/new-owners with the contents of the example above, and we want to change the owners for a mailing list called ccn (ie. ccn@lists.triumf.ca), we would run:

[/usr/lib/mailman]$ ./bin/config_list -i /tmp/new-owners ccn

Once complete, alice@_example.com and bob@_example.com will be the new owners of the ccn list.

Rest Admin Password

To reset the list admin password, the easiest thing to do is to use the change_pw command. Just specify the list name and it'll generate a password for you that you can forward on to the end user. Eg.

[/usr/lib/mailman]$ ./bin/change_pw -l my-list
New my-list password: abc123

If you want to specify a password, you can do so with the -p argument, but remember that your new password will show up in the shell history unless you go out of your way to prevent that from happening. A good strategy in a bash shell is to use set +o history to prevent your password changing commands from showing up in the history list. Note that this still doesn't prevent the password from showing up in the process list if someone is watching that.