mladmin 0.10 review

mladmin project main purpose in the life is to automatically discard the messages held for administrative approval by Mailman mailing

License: BSD License File size: 5K Developer: TT-Solutions

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mladmin project main purpose in the life is to automatically discard the messages held for administrative approval by Mailman mailing list manager.

If you use Mailman (for example because your mailing lists are hosted by SourceForge) you probably get as much spam as I do, that is anything between 1 and 10 messages daily. I got tired of having to click on half a dozen checkboxes in my browser to delete them manually and so wrote this tiny script to do it automatically.

It is especially useful for the announcement lists where normally no messages are posted at all so there is no danger of discarding a legitimate message.

Usage instructions:
By default, it will list the messages being held for approval, if any, and ask you if you want to discard all the messages which is the most common action. If the second parameter is specified it can be list, discard or accept. The first just lists the messages without proposing to discard them, the others discard or accept all (if there are no more parameters) or just the specified (after them on command line) messages.

Please note that there is no way to undelete discarded messages later, so use the discard command carefully!

Other supported options are:

--help, --version: self explanatory
--pass=password: specify the administrative password on the command line (otherwise you'll be asked for it)
--cookies=file: if this option is given, the administrative cookie will be saved to the specified file and you won't have to enter the password again until it expires. You should understand that storing Mailman cookies is a security risk and use this options with care.
--proxy=url: specify the proxy to use
Example of a session using this script:

% ./mladmin.pl --cookies=list.cookies http://lists.sf.net/lists/admindb/list-name list
Administrative password for list-name: password will be saved in list.cookies file
Logging in to list-name... ok.
2 messages held for approval for the list list-name:

N From Subject Reason
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 spammer@yahoo.com ... Post by non-member to
2 someone@somewhe.re valid subject Post by non-member to
2 spammer@lycos.co.kr (±¤°?) ??,???????­ 4???¦ ???? Post by non-member to
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
% ./mladmin.pl --cookies=list.cookies http://lists.sf.net/lists/admindb/list-name accept 2
Preparing to accept 1 message... 1 message accepted.
% ./mladmin.pl --cookies=list.cookies http://lists.sf.net/lists/admindb/list-name discard
Preparing to discard all messages... 2 messages discarded.

Requirements:
Perl
HTTP::Cookies
LWP::UserAgent
HTML::Parser

What's New in This Release:
Now works with mailman 2.1+ (which is used on SourceForge, so this upgrade is required to continue to use mladmin with the mailing lists hosted there).