- Mailman-users - lists.mailman3.org

[GSoC 2026] [Feature Proposal] Per-List Backup and Restore Support
by sonika gutha March 12, 2026

March 12, 2026

*Introduction: * My name is *Sonika Chowdary Gutha*, and I am a *second-year Computer Science undergraduate at BITS Pilani, India*. I recently completed a *6-month internship in Backend Development using Python and Django*, where I gained experience in building backend systems and working with REST APIs.I am also familiar with the *MERN stack and the Flutter framework*, and I have experience developing both web and mobile applications. In addition I have been introduced to the fundamentals of several programming languages, including *Python, C++, and JavaScript*. I am exploring the possibility of implementing a *per-list backup and restore feature* for Mailman. The goal of this feature is to allow list administrators or owners to *export the configuration and membership data of a specific mailing list into a portable backup file and restore it later when needed*. This could be useful in situations such as: - Migrating lists between servers - Recovering from configuration mistakes - Replicating list setups across environments *Implementation:* The following diagram provides a visual representation of the proposed backup and restore workflow <https://excalidraw.com/#json=PhUB9tdMrupMfpx7O6_i6,OLBUtBJjL5_sCR-UokrNHw> .: I plan to implement this feature in two parts. The main backup and restore logic should live in *Mailman Core*, since that is where the actual list configuration and membership data are stored. My idea is to define a *versioned JSON format* that captures the important per-list data such as list settings, members, owners, moderators, and relevant subscription preferences. On the export side, Core would gather this data and write it into a portable backup file. On the restore side, it would read the file, validate its contents, recreate the list if necessary, and restore the saved settings and memberships. On the *Postorius* side, I would implement the user-facing workflow for this feature. This would include an option for list owners or administrators to download a backup file for a specific list, as well as a page where they can upload and restore that file when needed. For the initial version, I plan to keep the feature focused and reliable by covering configuration and membership data first, while leaving more complex areas such as archives or other external components out of scope unless they are explicitly expected. *Questions:* 1. For the first version, what exactly should be included in the per-list backup: only settings and memberships, or also items like templates, ban lists, and member preferences? 2. Should the main export and restore implementation live in Mailman Core, with Postorius mainly responsible for the UI and workflow? 3. Is a *versioned JSON format* the preferred choice for the backup file? 4. Should restore only support creating or recreating a list from backup, or should it also support restoring into an already existing list?Thank you for your time and feedback. Please feel free to *suggest any changes or improvements to the proposed implementation*, also if possible hope i can get answers for the above questions which will be helpful for my proposal, I would be happy to incorporate them.:) Best regards, Sonika

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venv and upgrade from python 3.11 to 3.13 because of OS-upgrade
by Andreas Vetter March 12, 2026

March 12, 2026

Hi, I have a venv installation (mailman postorius django-mailman3 hyperkitty mailman-web) with python 3.11 from the Linux distribution. Since distribution EOL nears, I checked python version in next distribution and it is python 3.13. So my guess is, after distro upgrade, this will stop working. How should I upgrade? -- Mit freundlichen Gruessen, Andreas Vetter

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Where to start looking?
by Paul Tomblin March 12, 2026

March 12, 2026

So I imported all our mailman2 lists into mailman3, and it appears it didn't preserve passwords. So my wife (who administers 3 lists of her own) tried to use the reset password link (multiple times) but she never gets the email. I don't see any outgoing email to her in mail.log, or any of the mailman logs. I do the exact same thing as her and I get the email. Any suggestions on what I should be looking for? -- Paul Tomblin

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Accept these non-members
by Lars Bjørndal March 10, 2026

March 10, 2026

Hi, list! I have an announce only Mailman3 list. When I log into the web interface as an admin user, and go to the specified list, and choose Settings, I find the Message Acceptance tab. There, I find the edit field Accept these non-members. But this field is empty, although I know that some people have permissions and are able to post to this list. How can I find the list of these non-members and add more people or delete someone? I'm running Mailman version 3.3.10, and mailman-web version 4.2.21. Any hints? Thanks, Lars

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Reset bounce count in MM3
by iMark March 10, 2026

March 10, 2026

Hi, Is there an equivalent of Mailman 2's "bin/reset_bounce.py" in Mailman 3 ? Thanks, Mark

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Additional info/tags on Members
by mkoerber＠akamai.com March 9, 2026

March 9, 2026

I am managing a few mailing lists which are hosted on a mailman3 instance. None of these are allowing self-subscription, but I have a need to be able to search the membership by association, ie whether they belong to any of a number of named groups Currently there does not seem to be any means for attaching a comment field, tag or such to group members, which would allow keeping such metadata and using it for searching members. (and no, the email addresses of members of one or more groups may not be similar, hence searching by @domain or such will not work) Also, the group-association info should *not* be exposed externally (ie to the member in question or any others), which makes adding the tag/group info as part of the full name impossible. Is there any way to do this in mailman3? If not can this be counted as a feature request: - in mailman3 itself: + add a facility that allows storing additional info to each member , either as a (largish) comment field or an array of tags ++ if tags, it should support managing thousands of them (but each member is likely to only need a few associated) + if tags are used, each list should have its own set of tags (though a means to designate a list to participate in a global tag collection might be useful). - in postorious: + allow modifying the comment field, or adding/removing/modifying one or more tags to each list-member + allow searching a group's membership by tags (or substring in the comment field), ++ following which mass-operations (deletion, setting moderation flags etc) should be possible based on individual selection of the found fields mailman3 really only would need to support storing the additional data for each member, as (at least in my use case) that data is not actually required for mail forwarding. However, it seems to be desirable to store the info in the mailman3 database rather than an external system (to reduce chances that these might get out of sync).

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Opinions wanted.
by Mark Sapiro March 9, 2026

March 9, 2026

There is currently a merge request at <https://gitlab.com/mailman/django-mailman3/-/merge_requests/345> to hide the "Results per page:" dropdown from some Postorius and HyperKitty pages when the full list of items (lists) is on the page. I.e. when the number of items is <=10 and the "Results per page:" is the default 10, don't display the dropdown. However there is some controversy over whether this should also apply say when the number of items is > 10 but still is on one page. So the question is if we are going to hide the dropdown when "Results per page:" is the default 10 and there are <= 10 items so all are on the page, should we also hide it when say "Results per page:" is 25 and there are 22 items all on the page. Your opinion on this is requested via a reply in this thread. See the merge request (link above) for arguments pro and con. -- Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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How to upgrade to 3.10
by Paul Tomblin March 9, 2026

March 9, 2026

I installed 3.9 with pip last week, but i want to upgrade to 3.10. But pip install -U mailman postorius django-mailman3 hyperkitty mailman-web doesn't upgrade it. Requirement already satisfied: mailman in ./venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages (3.3.9) Collecting mailman Using cached mailman-3.3.10-py3-none-any.whl.metadata (2.4 kB) Requirement already satisfied: postorius in ./venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages (1.3.13) ... a bunch of these ... INFO: pip is looking at multiple versions of mailman to determine which version is compatible with other requirements. This could take a while. Requirement already satisfied: python-dateutil>=2.0 in ./venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages (from mailman) (2.9.0.post0) ...a bunch more... -- Paul Tomblin

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alembic version
by Thomas Krichel March 7, 2026

March 7, 2026

On my fresh install I am running into problems with the alembic number. root@darni ~ # systemctl restart mailman3 ; systemctl restart mailmanwebq Job for mailman3.service failed because the control process exited with error code. See "systemctl status mailman3.service" and "journalctl -xeu mailman3.service" for details. Failed to restart mailmanwebq.service: Unit mailmanwebq.service not found. root@darni ~ # systemctl status mailman3.service × mailman3.service - GNU Mailing List Manager Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/mailman3.service; enabled; preset: enabled) Active: failed (Result: exit-code) since Sat 2026-03-07 07:01:03 UTC; 2s ago Duration: 23h 33min 7.258s Invocation: dde1db5581914d96b1da564d537df84a Process: 1209747 ExecStart=/usr/local/mailman/venv/bin/mailman start (code=exited, status=1/FAILURE) Mem peak: 64.8M CPU: 681ms Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: File "/usr/lib/python3.13/contextlib.py", line 162, in __exit__ Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: self.gen.throw(value) Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^^^^^^^ Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: File "/usr/local/mailman/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/alembic/script/base.py", line 245, in _catch_revision_errors Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: raise util.CommandError(resolution) from re Mar 07 07:01:03 darni mailman[1209747]: alembic.util.exc.CommandError: Can't locate revision identified by '8cc1f79f4459' Mar 07 07:01:03 darni systemd[1]: mailman3.service: Control process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE Mar 07 07:01:03 darni systemd[1]: mailman3.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'. Mar 07 07:01:03 darni systemd[1]: Failed to start mailman3.service - GNU Mailing List Manager. Mar 07 07:01:03 darni systemd[1]: mailman3.service: Consumed 681ms CPU time over 727ms wall clock time, 64.8M memory peak. Indeed: root@darni ~ # sudo -u postgres psql -d mailman3 psql (18.2 (Debian 18.2-1)) Type "help" for help. mailman3=# SELECT version_num FROM alembic_version; version_num -------------- 8cc1f79f4459 (1 row) Setting the number to say 0 mailman3=# update alembic_version set version_num=0; UPDATE 1 and repeating the restart yields the same problem. -- Written by Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel on his 22191st day.

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Re: Heads up: settings.ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD is deprecated
by Thomas Krichel March 7, 2026

March 7, 2026

This issue is still there for me. I am starting a new installation from scratch, with the venv method in 3.13. (venv) root@darni ~ # mailman-web migrate System check identified some issues: WARNINGS: ?: settings.ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD is deprecated, use: settings.ACCOUNT_LOGIN_METHODS = {'email', 'username'} ?: settings.ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED is deprecated, use: settings.ACCOUNT_SIGNUP_FIELDS = ['email*', 'username*', 'password1*', 'password2*'] Operations to perform: Apply all migrations: account, admin, auth, contenttypes, django_mailman3, django_q, hyperkitty, postorius, sessions, sites, socialaccount Running migrations: No migrations to apply. I have root@darni /etc/mailman3 # head -15 /etc/mailman3/settings.py # Mailman Web configuration file. # /etc/mailman3/settings.py # Get the default settings. from mailman_web.settings.base import * from mailman_web.settings.mailman import * # Settings below supplement or override the defaults. # see https://lists.mailman3.org/archives/list/mailman-users@mailman3.org/thread/U... del ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD ACCOUNT_LOGIN_METHODS = {'email', 'username'} del ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED ACCOUNT_SIGNUP_FIELDS = ['email*', 'username*', 'password1*', 'password2*'] Which is what I believe Wikinaut suggested works for her/him. But the warning is still there. I added Marks suggestions to add verbiage in the actual codebase root@darni /etc/mailman3 # tail -17 /usr/local/mailman/venv/lib/python3.13/site-packages/mailman_web/settings/mailman.py ### added by ToK #: Django Allauth #ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD = "username_email" #ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED = True #ACCOUNT_EMAIL_VERIFICATION = "mandatory" #ACCOUNT_UNIQUE_EMAIL = True ACCOUNT_LOGIN_METHODS = {'email', 'username'} ACCOUNT_SIGNUP_FIELDS = ['username*', 'email*', 'password1*', 'password2*'] ACCOUNT_EMAIL_VERIFICATION = "mandatory" ACCOUNT_UNIQUE_EMAIL = True ACCOUNT_EMAIL_UNKNOWN_ACCOUNTS = False del ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED ACCOUNT_SIGNUP_FIELDS = ['username*', 'email*', 'password1*', 'password2*'] Restarted root@darni /etc/mailman3 # systemctl restart mailman3 ; systemctl restart mailmanweb Same old. (venv) root@darni ~ # mailman-web migrate System check identified some issues: WARNINGS: ?: settings.ACCOUNT_AUTHENTICATION_METHOD is deprecated, use: settings.ACCOUNT_LOGIN_METHODS = {'email', 'username'} ?: settings.ACCOUNT_EMAIL_REQUIRED is deprecated, use: settings.ACCOUNT_SIGNUP_FIELDS = ['email*', 'username*', 'password1*', 'password2*'] Operations to perform: Apply all migrations: account, admin, auth, contenttypes, django_mailman3, django_q, hyperkitty, postorius, sessions, sites, socialaccount Running migrations: No migrations to apply. Maybe I missunderstood something. -- Written by Thomas Krichel http://openlib.org/home/krichel on his 22190th day.

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