Is there an option to "disable" a list temporarily? (feature request?!)
Hello dear Mailman Team,
I scanned through the web interface of my mailman instance... and I did not find an option to disable a list temporarily ("sending" and "access to web interface")... This might come in handy when a list is abused for sending spams or when a list owner wants his/her list to be removed... Instead of removing the list instantly I would disable it for three months first... (You never know with users... ;-) ) Preferably I would backup the list (settings and members) and the archives, but as seen in the discussion there is actually no backup mechanism for lists...
Is there an option to disable a list (except from resetting passwords and remove/disable mail aliases)?
If not I'd like to hand this in as a feature request... xD
Thank you very much and kind regards
Christian
On Mon, Feb 2, 2026 at 2:27 PM Christian Schneider < christian.schneider@tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
Hello dear Mailman Team,
I scanned through the web interface of my mailman instance... and I did not find an option to disable a list temporarily ("sending" and "access to web interface")... This might come in handy when a list is abused for sending spams or when a list owner wants his/her list to be removed... Instead of removing the list instantly I would disable it for three months first... (You never know with users... ;-) ) Preferably I would backup the list (settings and members) and the archives, but as seen in the discussion there is actually no backup mechanism for lists...
Is there an option to disable a list (except from resetting passwords and remove/disable mail aliases)?
To disable access to Postorius, you can achieve that using the web server. To disable mail processing, you do that by disabling the mail aliases or just redirect a list address to /dev/null.
If not I'd like to hand this in as a feature request... xD
I always see the Devs say that you do that by creating an issue in gitlab.
-- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254 7 3200 0004/+254 7 2274 3223 In an Internet failure case, the #1 suspect is a constant: DNS. "Oh, the cruft.", egrep -v '^$|^.*#' ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :-) [How to ask smart questions: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html]
On February 2, 2026 3:26:40 AM PST, Christian Schneider <christian.schneider@tu-dortmund.de> wrote:
Hello dear Mailman Team,
I scanned through the web interface of my mailman instance... and I did not find an option to disable a list temporarily ("sending" and "access to web interface")... This might come in handy when a list is abused for sending spams or when a list owner wants his/her list to be removed... Instead of removing the list instantly I would disable it for three months first... (You never know with users... ;-) ) Preferably I would backup the list (settings and members) and the archives, but as seen in the discussion there is actually no backup mechanism for lists...
Is there an option to disable a list (except from resetting passwords and remove/disable mail aliases)?
If not I'd like to hand this in as a feature request... xD
There is an emergency moderation setting. It isn't really what you're asking for, but it might be helpful for spam attacks.
As far as backup and restore of lists is concerned, there are issues at <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1182> and <https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/-/issues/13>.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> Sent from my Not_an_iThing with standards compliant, open source software.
Mark Sapiro writes:
As far as backup and restore of lists is concerned, there are issues at <https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/-/issues/1182> and <https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/-/issues/13>.
This is now a GSoC project. Still no promises, but there's a better chance than with the current priorities of the core developers. https://wiki.list.org/DEV/Google%20Summer%20of%20Code%202026#Per-list_backup
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
Christian Schneider writes:
Is there an option to disable a list (except from resetting passwords and remove/disable mail aliases)?
Not really. It would be complicated, depending on exactly what features you want disabled. As far as posting goes, doing that at the MTA aliases stage is definitely preferred over setting a flag in Mailman somewhere. This not only saves CPU cycles for Mailman, but also for the MTA.
You can set the emergency moderation flag, and if you want to prevent the owners from reverting that you can remove the owner role from those members of the list (log in as superuser, find the list, pull down the Users menu and select "owners", delete the owners -- this does not delete the users, and if they are subscribers or moderators those roles will not be deleted). To prevent new subscriptions you can set the subscription option to approve. Of course then somebody has to clean up the held messages and subscriptions occasionally.
If not I'd like to hand this in as a feature request... xD
You should do that at https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman, as "disable" could mean several different things when you consider subscriptions and archives.
I personally will not have time to work on this for quite a while, but if you do write up a feature request I'll put it on the list of GSoC tasks I'm composing.
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
Thank you for all the input!
For now it seems to me as a viable approach to delete the list's mail aliases and using a redirect on the proxying webserver to make the URL of the lists admin interface inaccessible! :-)
All this hustle to accommodate users decomissioning a list and after three days wanting it back... :-/
Kind regards
Chris
Christian Schneider writes:
All this hustle to accommodate users decomissioning a list and after three days wanting it back... :-/
I'm curious how often you (or anybody) sees this request.
FWIW there are 3 issues related to per-list backups. It's a plausible feature (lots of potential applications), so I just added the below to Mailman's 2026 GSoC page, so maybe we'll get an intern to do it.
== Per-list backup == In Mailman 2, the list configurations were stored in list-specific structures as Python ''pickles''. Backup of a single list was just a matter of copying the pickle file. Currently there is no way to extract and restore the configuration and membership of a single list from a Mailman 3 installation. This project would involve picking a format such as a Python pickle or a JSON object, extracting the list-specific data from the backing database, and storing it to a file, as well as reversing the process.
Tags: ''core'', ''postorius''
=== Requirements ===
- Level: medium
- Estimated effort: 175 hours
=== Mentors ===
- Stephen J. Turnbull
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
participants (4)
-
Christian Schneider -
Mark Sapiro -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Washington Odhiambo