So sferics' disk died
and took everything that wasn't backed up with it. It turns out that one
of the important configuration items that weren't backed up were the
configurations and subcribers lists of the Mailman mailing-lists.
To get the subscribers lists back, we didn't have many options:
- Resubscribe all posters, which would also subscribe the ones who did
unsubscribe at some point, and kick out all the lurkers... Not so good.
- Process all the administrative messages to get a chronological list
of subscribe/unsubscribe action, and rebuild the list from there.
- Seed the list with the list of posters, if possible the subscribed ones
(i.e. not the one whose mails were passed through moderation)
We use Mailman for managing our mailing-lists. It works well enough
for us, but it has its share of hate:
- Localized admin messages are nice, but a X-Mailman-Action
header would be nicer, so we would have to process the body of each
actions, in all languages we might have used
Luckily, it also has a few helpful headers:
- List-Id, so we can process a folder full of admin messages
and know about which list each message is about
- X-Mailman-Approved-At, so we can detect messages sent by
non-subscribed posters
I used Mail::Box
to create two scripts to process the messages (in French and English,
so anyone who subscribed in German is out of luck) and provide some
useful info (the people with the archives and the admin-fu did the actual
work of fixing the lists).
Sure, Mail::Box is slow, and the interface is a bit complicated,
but on the other hand it is well documented, and it's correct.
Summary at the end of the day^Wlong week-end:
- (incomplete backups)--
- Mailman-- # misses useful headers that would have made the job easier
- Mail::Box++ # gets the job done in 20 lines
