How do I move a list to a different server-Mailman installation.

3.4. How do I move a list to a different server/Mailman installation.

Note: the process of moving lists and archives from one Mailman 2.1.x installation to another same or newer release installation is very straightforward. It has been outlined several times on the mailman-users@python.org list. A couple of recent posts are at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-January/055208.html and http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-January/055211.html.

Also, see 4.70 How do I change the name of (rename) a list? which talks about changing the name of a list on a given server, but the process for moving a list to another server without changing its name is similar.

There is a document at http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/567 which may also be helpful. It is fairly general, not too Debian specific.

Barry Warsaw has described the process he went through to upgrade from 2.0.10 to 2.1b2, which is similar to the process of moving a list from one server to another, at the following link:

http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg03127.html

Proceed at your own risk, it may or may not be relevant.

The process of removing subscribers from one list and moving them to another is described in the FAQ answer at:

How do I remove subscribers from a list and put them on a different list?

If you can only move part of the list due to not having full read permissions to the old list, you can regenerate the archive from the .mbox of the old archive using the techniques described in this FAQ answer:

How can I remove a post from the list archive or remove an entire archive?

Finally, you also need to update the MTA aliases. Run <mailman>/bin/genaliases to generate the list (or actually update if you've configured Mailman for you MTA).

Kevin Gagel's steps for moving Mailman from different OS and upgrading to a newer version.

Going from Redhat 7.3, Mailman 2.1.4 to SuSE 8.0, Mailman 2.0.4 while upgrading 2.0.4 to 2.1.5. This can be done in three basic steps.

1.)Copy the lists from the old server to the new server.

2.)Upgrade Mailman from 2.0.4 to 2.1.5

3.)Set the permissions and correct the url.

1 To copy the lists, cd into the mailman directory that holds "data", "archives", and "lists". Use tar to compress them into three files like this:

tar -cpvW -f /root/mmdata ./data

tar -cpvW -f /root/mmarchives ./archives

tar -cpvW -f /root/mmlists ./lists

Then copy these three files to the new server under the mailman directory where the above directories exist. Once you've done that, cd into that directory and begin the expansion with the following:

tar -xvf mmdata

tar -xvf mmarchives

tar -xvf mmlists

2 Set the permissions from this directory with:

chown -R nobody:mailman .

chmod -R a+rx,g+ws .

3 Now your ready to upgrade from 2.0.4 to 2.1.5, follow all instrunctions for your upgrade in the UPGRADE document. You'll find that in the source package you've downloaded. For the configure process I had to use these paramaters:

--prefix=/usr/lib/mailman --with-var-prefix=/var/lib/mailman --with-groupid=nogroup --with-python=/usr/bin/python

I had use these because SuSE splits the package and installed it to different locations. You can go with the default Mailman install if you'd like. Just be sure to locate the three tar files and expand them to the correct mailman directory.

4 Now your ready to fix the installation. By now you should have mailman running and working but your old lists and archives don't yet show up. This step fixes that. Cd into the mailman/bin directory. Run the following command for each list you have transfered:

withlist -l -r fix_url listname

All should be well and working now. One caveat that might occur is you'll start getting notices about a missing stringIO modules. If this occurs to you then delete the following directories from the mailman directory and redo the above steps:

archives data lists locks logs qfiles spam

If your transfering from one OS to another and the locations of files have changed you'll find that you loose access to the archives. The fix for this is to delete the links in the /pathto/mailman/archives/public directory and redo them with the correct link to /pathto/mailman/archives/private/listname and listname.mbox The key to this one is to examine what you currently have and fix it to what it should be.

Converted from the Mailman FAQ Wizard

This is one of many Frequently Asked Questions.