Here at the GNOME Foundation we maintain a large number of mailman-powered mailing lists, which facilitates discussion on development and related projects. The maintenance and moderation (read: spam filtering) of these lists can become a burden on the list maintainer(s), and many of them fall behind.

I have maintained a number of Free Software mailing lists over the years, and the best solution that I’ve found to keep on top of this is a tool called ‘listadmin’. listadmin is a Perl-based command line utility that communicates with the mailman web-interface and handles the moderation of mailing lists. I’ve found this tool to be a huge timesaver with the half-dozen lists that I normally maintain. To be honest, as part of my morning routine I run ‘listadmin’ and I complete the moderation of over a a dozen lists in under a minute. It is really quite nice.

For some reason, listadmin is problematic with our GNOME mailing lists (the lists I mention above are Ubuntu-related lists, which is a different mailman version than we run here at the GNOME Foundation). It’ll work with some lists and not with others, and the reason is unclear. I’ve tried troubleshooting it a bit, but my Perl doesn’t go too far beyond local system administration scripting.

If anyone out there on the internets considers themselves a Perl Guru and would like to donate some time toward this cause, please contact me. It would be a great benefit to the foundation, and a real time saver for list moderators if we could figure out the issue with listadmin (perhaps it just requires a small patch). The ability to maintain one list or a dozen lists becomes simple with this tool, and would really allow us to catch up and get a handle on some of these pending mail queues.

If you are interested, please find me in #sysadmin on irc.gnome.org, or email me at cedwards AT I HATE THE SPAM gnome org.