Mailman

Commands

Set the Mailman site password, prompting from the terminal

mmsitepass [newpassword]

How do I make an "Announce Only" newsletter with Mailman 2.1.x?

Privacy Options >> Subscription Rules Who can view subscription list? (List admin only)

Privacy Options >> Sender Filters By default, should new list member postings be moderated? (Yes) Action to take when a moderated member posts to the list. (Hold) Action to take for postings from non-members for which no explicit action is defined. (Hold)

Auto-responder settings Should Mailman send an auto-response to mailing list posters? (Yes) Auto-response text to send to mailing list posters: "Sorry, only the site administrator can post to this list." Number of days between auto-responses: (0)

Membership Management >> Membership List Set everyone's moderation bit, including those members not currently visible (On)

Now that everyone has their moderation bit on (which means their posts are subject to moderator approval) and "Action to take when a moderated member posts to the list" is Hold, the administrator will have to approve their own posts. You could turn off the moderation bit for moderators' email addresses, but this is not very secure because email addresses can be easily forged.

You can customize these settings as you like, but to prevent unauthorized people from posting to you list, always have their moderation bit(flag) on. You should always keep "By default, should new list member postings be moderated?" set to "Yes" so new members are also moderated.

Common issues

Error running check_perms

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/sbin/check_perms", line 380, in ?
    checkall()
  File "/usr/sbin/check_perms", line 196, in checkall
    os.path.walk(d, checkwalk, STATE)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.4/posixpath.py", line 290, in walk
    func(arg, top, names)
  File "/usr/sbin/check_perms", line 120, in checkwalk
    print _('%(path)s bad group (has: %(groupname)s, '
  File "/usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/i18n.py", line 90, in _
    return tns % dict
ValueError: unsupported format character 't' (0x74) at index 8

run this before running check_perms

export LANG=C