If you ever had to moderate a mailman list, like the ones on
-alioth.debian.org, you know the web interface is fairly slow to
-operate. First you visit one web page, enter the moderation password
-and get a new page shown with a list of all the messages to moderate
-and various options for each email address. This take a while for
-every list you moderate, and you need to do it regularly to do a good
-job as a list moderator. But there is a quick alternative,
-the
-listadmin program. It allow you to check lists for new messages
-to moderate in a fraction of a second. Here is a test run on two
-lists I recently took over:
-
-
-% time listadmin xiph
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-commits@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-fetching data for pkg-xiph-maint@lists.alioth.debian.org ... nothing in queue
-
-real 0m1.709s
-user 0m0.232s
-sys 0m0.012s
-%
-
-
-
In 1.7 seconds I had checked two mailing lists and confirmed that
-there are no message in the moderation queue. Every morning I
-currently moderate 68 mailman lists, and it normally take around two
-minutes. When I took over the two pkg-xiph lists above a few days
-ago, there were 400 emails waiting in the moderator queue. It took me
-less than 15 minutes to process them all using the listadmin
-program.
-
-
If you install
-the listadmin
-package from Debian and create a file ~/.listadmin.ini
-with content like this, the moderation task is a breeze:
-
-
-username username@example.org
-spamlevel 23
-default discard
-discard_if_reason "Posting restricted to members only. Remove us from your mail list."
-
-password secret
-adminurl https://{domain}/mailman/admindb/{list}
-mailman-list@lists.example.com
-
-password hidden
-other-list@otherserver.example.org
-
-
-
There are other options to set as well. Check the manual page to
-learn the details.
-
-
If you are forced to moderate lists on a mailman installation where
-the SSL certificate is self signed or not properly signed by a
-generally accepted signing authority, you can set a environment
-variable when calling listadmin to disable SSL verification:
-
-
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 listadmin
-
-
-
If you want to moderate a subset of the lists you take care of, you
-can provide an argument to the listadmin script like I do in the
-initial screen dump (the xiph argument). Using an argument, only
-lists matching the argument string will be processed. This make it
-quick to accept messages if you notice the moderation request in your
-email.
-
-
Without the listadmin program, I would never be the moderator of 68
-mailing lists, as I simply do not have time to spend on that if the
-process was any slower. The listadmin program have saved me hours of
-time I could spend elsewhere over the years. It truly is nice free
-software.
-
-
As usual, if you use Bitcoin and want to show your support of my
-activities, please send Bitcoin donations to my address
-15oWEoG9dUPovwmUL9KWAnYRtNJEkP1u1b.
-
-
Update 2014-10-27: Added missing 'username' statement in
-configuration example. Also, I've been told that the
-PERL_LWP_SSL_VERIFY_HOSTNAME=0 setting do not work for everyone. Not
-sure why.
-
