Residual signature?
One of my mailing lists that I converted over from my Mailman 2 instance doesn’t get used much. Well, something momentous happened and it got several messages overnight, and I noticed something odd about them. Every one has the signature “— \nAdministration:”. This looks like a fragment of the signature that Mailman 2 used to put on them, but I can’t figure out where it’s configured. There’s nothing in the list or domain template list that would do that. How can I stop it doing that?
-- Paul Tomblin
Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users writes:
One of my mailing lists that I converted over from my Mailman 2 instance doesn’t get used much. Well, something momentous happened and it got several messages overnight, and I noticed something odd about them. Every one has the signature “— \nAdministration:”. This looks like a fragment of the signature that Mailman 2 used to put on them, but I can’t figure out where it’s configured. There’s nothing in the list or domain template list that would do that. How can I stop it doing that?
The only thing I can think of is that there is a template variable reference starting the template, and for some reason that has that odd signature component as a value.
If it's not in the footer template or pulled in by a variable reference, I don't think Mailman's doing it. IIRC there are actually three templates for the footer: one for the regular delivery, one for the digest, and one for both (Mailman checks for the appropriate one, then for the dual-use one). It only uses the first one found. It does not try to merge the mode-specific footer with the dual-use footer.
Are you getting deliveries for that list as a digest or regular delivery? Were the messages from different sources, or are you otherwise pretty sure that the author(s) didn't add them?
Steve
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
On Thu, May 28, 2026, at 7:26 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users writes:
?
The only thing I can think of is that there is a template variable reference starting the template, and for some reason that has that odd signature component as a value.
Like I said, there’s no templates listed in the UI. This affects all messages to the list, whether the sender is using TOFU quoting or trimmed top quoting. None of the other mailing lists in this domain have any templates either, and none of them have any weird footers.
Before I converted to Mailman 3, the footer was “— \nAdministration: <old admin url>” and I think that was under non-digest sending options.
-- Paul Tomblin
Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users writes:
Like I said, there’s no templates listed in the UI.
Ah, I read that as "no relevant templates".
The migration from Mailman 2 doesn't need a working Postorius, so it doesn't use the same mechanism as the UI. It should write to a parallel tree under the $mailman_home/$var/templates directory. The fallback tree is in site-packages/mailman/templates, and otherwise they have the same layout. Since you're not seeing anything in the other lists, the migrated tree is probably very sparse; tab completion in the shell will probably take you straight to the relevant directory.
$mailman_home is where you installed Mailman, or wherever your distro package installed it. Most likely $var = "var", and if not you can probably find it in your mailman.cfg (or just use "find $mailman_home -name var").
Steve
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
On Thu, May 28, 2026, at 8:20 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users writes:
Like I said, there’s no templates listed in the UI.
Ah, I read that as "no relevant templates".
Sorry, I wasn't clearer because I didn't know about the non-UI templates before.
The migration from Mailman 2 doesn't need a working Postorius, so it doesn't use the same mechanism as the UI. It should write to a parallel tree under the $mailman_home/$var/templates directory. The fallback tree is in site-packages/mailman/templates, and otherwise
Turns out there are a lot of files in /opt/mailman/mm/var/templates/lists, but I hadn't noticed them before because most of them where empty. In a few of the ones I don't subscribe to or which don't get a lot of traffic, those templates were "-- \nAdministration:" or sometimes "== \n-- Administration: %(web_page_url)slistinfo/%(_internal_name)s". I suspect that the ones that didn't have the text after Administration: versus the ones that did were some sort of bug in the conversion script, because I'm pretty sure I had the same footer configured for all those lists.
But anyway, I had no idea those templates were there, so I'll have to file that away in my memory for next time I wonder why lists have footers that don't show up in the UI. Am I right in thinking that a UI configured template will override the ones in that directory tree?
-- Paul Tomblin
On 5/28/26 06:57, Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users wrote:
But anyway, I had no idea those templates were there, so I'll have to file that away in my memory for next time I wonder why lists have footers that don't show up in the UI. Am I right in thinking that a UI configured template will override the ones in that directory tree?
That is correct. Creating a template in Postorius will put an entry for that template in the template table in the database with a URI pointing to Postorius and that is where Mailman core will go to find that template. However, it you delete that template from Postorius, that will remove the entry from the template table, and absent that, Mailman core will fall back to default search rules.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 5/28/26 03:30, Paul Tomblin via Mailman-users wrote:
One of my mailing lists that I converted over from my Mailman 2 instance doesn’t get used much. Well, something momentous happened and it got several messages overnight, and I noticed something odd about them. Every one has the signature “— \nAdministration:”. This looks like a fragment of the signature that Mailman 2 used to put on them, but I can’t figure out where it’s configured. There’s nothing in the list or domain template list that would do that. How can I stop it doing that?
Look in /path/to/mailman/var/templates/lists/<LIST-ID>/en/ for a list:member:regular:footer.txt template.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On 5/28/26 12:23, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Look in /path/to/mailman/var/templates/lists/<LIST-ID>/en/ for a list:member:regular:footer.txt template.
Ooops. Replied before reading the entire thread.
Note that Mailman's import21 will create header and footer templates from the Mailman 2.1 list settings, but since the substitution syntax is different for Mailman 3 templates, it doesn't always do a good job.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (3)
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Mark Sapiro -
Paul Tomblin -
Stephen J. Turnbull