Mailman and HTTPS

So Frobbit! this last weekend started to use HTTPS “all over the place” thanks to Let’s Encrypt. The launch will be gradual because there are so many software packages that are completely broken in design, have bugs, errors, do not use proper libraries, tries to do things on their own, do not follow RFCs and what not.

One such package is Mailman (don’t even get me started on Wordpress).

The important information can be found here.

Note that you must do the following if you have multiple virtual domains (as Frobbit! has):

# $prefix/bin/withlist -l -r fix\_url listname -u list\_web\_domain

Because of this, when running hundreds of mailing lists in tons of domains, the following is what can make your day simpler (on Debian, adjust paths accordingly):

# for i in `grep unsubscribe /var/lib/mailman/data/virtual-mailman | awk '{ print $1 }'`; do
     echo $i
     A=`echo $i | sed 's/-unsubscribe.*$//'`
     B=`echo $i | sed 's/^.*@//'`
     withlist -l -r fix\_url $A -u $B
  done