Using mailman and bash to show list subscriptions suspended for bounces

If mail to a mailman mailing list subscriber bounces too many times, further deliveries to that address are suspended. It's often useful to track down these addresses.

# cd /usr/local/mailman/bin/
# for i in `./list_lists -b`; do echo : $i : >>/tmp/bounced.txt;./list_members --fullnames --nomail=bybounce $i >>/tmp/bounced.txt;done

The contents of the file will look like this:

: 2007-announce :
: 2007classgift :
: 2008-announce :
: 2009-announce :
: 2010-announce :
First Last <NETID@emory.edu>
First1 Last1 <NETID1@emory.edu>
: 505a-0ac-5079 :

Then you can investigate why mail to the two members of the 2010-announce list has been bouncing.

To mail a copy of the output file to yourself from the command line, do this:

# mail -s 'Bounces' YOURNAME@YOURDOM.AIN </tmp/bounced.txt

The key to all this is the "./list_lists -b" in the script fragment above. This gives you a bare listing of all the lists in the system. That gets fed back into the script to locate the held messages. Mailman shines at the command line.

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Quickie script to update mailman aliases

We run sendmail as our MTA and mailman as our list management solution. This is a script that we use to manage updates for mailman aliases. It leverages the built-in mailman command "genaliases" which will regenerate sendmail-style aliases for all of the lists on the system.

    #!/bin/bash
    
    #############################################
    # local script written to auto-update
    # the aliases.mailman file with new list aliases
    #
    #############################################
    
    /usr/local/mailman/bin/genaliases >/tmp/aliases.mailman
    sed -e "1,4d" </tmp/aliases.mailman >/tmp/aliases.mailman2
    mv -f /etc/aliases.mailman /etc/aliases.mailman.bak
    cp -f /tmp/aliases.mailman2 /etc/aliases.mailman
    rm -f /tmp/aliases.mailman*
    newaliases

As you can see from the script, all mailman list aliases are stored in the file /etc/aliases.mailman. To make this work, you need a line like this in your /etc/mail/sendmail.mc file:

define(`ALIAS_FILE', `/etc/aliases,/etc/aliases.mailman')dnl

I'm sure there are lots of other ways to do this. I believe that there are contrib scripts for mailman that more tightly integrate it with sendmail. If you're using Postfix, you can take a look at this suggestion.

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