Mailing List Management

IXP Manager has the ability to allow its users to subscribe / unsubscribe from Mailman mailing lists (it should be relatively easy to expand this to other mailing list managers).

The following sections explain the steps in how this is set up.

NB: This facility does not perform a 100% synchronisation. Any mailing list members that are added separately without a matching user in IXP Manager are not interfered with.

Configuring Available Mailman Lists

In application.ini, add an appropriate configuration such as:

;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;    
;; Mailing List Subscription Management Facility

; enable mailing list management
mailinglist.enabled = 1

; define the first available mailing list
mailinglists.listname1.name    = "A Mailing List"
mailinglists.listname1.desc    = "Description for the list."
mailinglists.listname1.email   = "[email protected]"
mailinglists.listname1.archive = "https://www.example.com/mailman/private/listname1/"

; define another mailing list (and as many as you like)
mailinglists.listname2.name    = "Another Mailing List"
mailinglists.listname2.desc    = "Description for the second list."
mailinglists.listname2.email   = "[email protected]"
mailinglists.listname2.archive = "https://www.example.com/mailman/private/listname2/"
mailinglists.listname2.syncpws = false

; The follow three commands are used to syncronise the mailing list with IXP Manager
mailinglist.cmd.list_members   = "/usr/local/mailman/bin/list_members"
mailinglist.cmd.add_members    = "/usr/local/mailman/bin/add_members -r -"
mailinglist.cmd.remove_members = "/usr/local/mailman/bin/remove_members -f - -n -N"
mailinglist.cmd.changepw       = "/usr/local/mailman/bin/withlist -q -l -r changepw"

There are three main sections to the above:

The statement to enable mailing list management. If this is not set, the user will not be offered subscription options and the CLI commands will not execute.
The list definitions. The listname1 and listname2 keys in the configuration variable name are important and must match the Mailman list key also as it is this name that is used by the commands. The parameters are used to provide the user with list information and links. Mailing list passwords are also sync'd from the IXP Manager user database unless syncpws is both defined and false for the given list.
The location of the specified mailman commands which is used by the syncronisation script generator (see below).

Explanation of Usage

This mailing list synchronisation / integration code was written for existing Mailman lists we have at INEX where some lists are public with subscribers that will never have an account on INEX's IXP Manager. As such, these scripts are written so that email addresses in common between IXP Manager and Mailman can manage their subscriptions in IXP Manager but those other subscribers will be unaffected.

Users in IXP Manager will either be marked as being subscribed to a list, not subscribed to a list or neither (i.e. a new user). Subscriptions are managed by user preferences of the format:

mailinglist.listname1.subscribed = 0/1

There are four steps to performing the synchronisation for each list which are done using the IXP Manager CLI script bin/ixptool.php:

The execution of the cli.mailing-list-init script which is really for new IXP Manager users (or initial set up of the mailing list feature). This script is piped the full subscribers list from Mailman (via list_members). This function will iterate through all users and, if they have no preference set for subscription to this list, will either add a "not subscribed" preference if their email address is not in the provided list of subscribers or a "subscribed" preference if it is.
The execution of the cli.mailing-list-subscribed action which lists all users who are subscribed to the given mailing list based on their user preferences. This is piped to the add_members Mailman script.
The execution of the cli.mailing-list-unsubscribed action which lists all users who are unsubscribed to the given mailing list based on their user preferences. This is piped to the remove_members Mailman script.
The execution of the cli.mailing-list-password-sync action which sets the mailing list password for all users who are unsubscribed to the given mailing list based on their IXP Manager user password. This action exec() the change password command directly. See Password Synchronisation below. Unlike the above three operations, the password sync executes a command directly (via PHP exec()). If you just want to print the commands to stdout, add the parameters -v -p noexec=1.

How to Implement

You can implement mailing list management by configuring IXP Manager as above. Then execute the following command:

bin/ixptool.php -a cli.mailing-list-sync-script >bin/mailing-list-sync.sh

This generates a script called mailing-list-sync.sh which performs each of the above 3 steps for each configured mailing list. If your mailing list configuration does not change, you will not need to rerun this.

You should now put this script into crontab and run as often as you feel is necessary. The current success message for a user updating their subscriptions says within 12 hours so we'd recommend at least running twice a day.

Password Synchronisation

By default, passwords from IXP Manager users with mailing list subscriptions will be sync'd to Mailman.

This is done via the Mailman withlist script and it requires a changepw.py script to be in the same directory as withlist and this script is not supplied by default (although it is documented). Create the following changepw.py in the same directory as withlist:

from Mailman.Errors import NotAMemberError

def changepw(mlist, addr, newpasswd):
    try:
        mlist.setMemberPassword(addr, newpasswd)
        mlist.Save()
    except NotAMemberError:
        print 'No address matched:', addr

Todo

better handling of multiple users with the same email address and documentation of same
user changes email address

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