Managing mailman on the command line

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Even though we moved our email from OS X server to google apps for education – we still manage our lists with a local mailman instance (still on 10.4). However the web based interface for adding new members can be a bit of a pain as it never seems to remember the right authorization when switching between lists – luckily mailman has some great command line tools.

These are documented here:

http://www.list.org/site.html

They are located in /usr/share/mailman/bin/

so you may want to add that to your path in .bash_profile

most have decent help summary with –help arg at command line

while the remove_members command accepts addresses on the command line itself:

remove_members [options] [listname] [addr1 ...]

remove_members staff frank@foo.com

The add_members command specifically wants file input. Sometimes I just want to add 2-3 so I use this trick:

add_members -r - staff <<-EOF
>sue@foo.com
>bob@bar.com
> <cntl-d>