Configuring GNU Mailman on Plesk 8, part 2

I’ve learned a few more things in the process of doing this. Since I needed to perform redirects to the new mailman lists (to accomodate legacy list names), it turns out that you have to use the Plesk control panel for this. So after getting my lists working without Plesk, I had to recreate them in Plesk. Not as bad as it sounds though. Here are the steps:

  1. First, export the existing list members (I had over a hundred on one list and didn’t want to enter them by hand), and then delete the existing list. The commands for this are:
    # cd /var/lib/mailman/lists
    # /usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_members LISTNAME > members.txt
    # /usr/lib/mailman/bin/rmlist LISTNAME
  2. Create the mailing list in Plesk, from Domains->DOMAINNAME->Mail->Mailing Lists, using the same LISTNAME as before
  3. Go to http://lists.DOMAINNAME/mailman/admin/LISTNAME to update the “terse phrase”, description, and other default settings.
  4. Go to Membership->Mass Subscription and paste in the names from the file you created in step 1. You probably don’t want to send a welcome message to these people since they were already members before.

Now you can can set up redirects for your old list names in Plesk, and they work (sort of). Received messages will no longer bounce back, but they will be held for the moderater with the reason (“Message has implicit destination”). Not sure how to avoid this, but hopefully it’s not too much trouble to manage. Good luck.

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