Using listadmin to manage mailman

I’m managing a bunch of mailman lists for work and out-of-work activities. The web interface of mailman is great, but sometimes, it is just slow to have to go through the web interface. It is unproductive when you have several pending messages and you have to go through all the queues. Hopefully, listadmin is there 🙂

Setup is easy on Ubuntu or Debian:

$ sudo apt-get install listadmin

Configuration is not really difficult. It is a file ~/.listadmin.ini, here is a sample configuration:

# lists.xxxxxx.com
adminurl https://lists.xxxxxx.com/admindb/{list}
password secret
dev@lists.xxxxxx.com
users@lists.xxxxx.com

Launching with the command line:

lionel@brehat:~$ listadmin lists.xxxxxx.fr
fetching data for dev@lists.xxxxxx.com ... nothing in queue
fetching data for users@lists.xxxxxx.com ...
[1/1] ============== users@lists.xxxxxxx.com =====================
From:     uaowiqemxjoije@mbit.ru
Subject:  Faire de l'argent en ligne - Plus de 500 euro/jour! ba
Reason:   Message avec destination implicite                   Spam? 0
Approve/Reject/Discard/Skip/view Body/Full/jump #/Undo/Help/Quit ? D
Submit changes? [yes] yes

By default, listadmin will go through all the lists in your configuration file. Note that you can have several lists on several hosts. You can limit to some list / host appending a list name or a regexp to the command line. In my example, I just limited to a host.