The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

On Wed, 2020-05-20 at 10:41 +0200, Stefan Hornburg (Racke) wrote:

> I found the following Git repository: 
> https://git.fs.lmu.de/roots/mailman2sympa, but I have no idea if these scripts are
> in a decent shape.

I successfully migrated a couple of thousand mailman lists, plus their archives, to Sympa several years ago at my previous employer using the mailman2sympa script. There were a few points worth noting. Hopefully the script has been improved since then...

First, mailman has whitelists, modlists and blacklists for posting whereas Sympa uses moderators, owners and scenari. This does not map very well, and the script achieves it by making all the people with posting rights into moderators or owners. We later developed a plugin for sympa to allow the same modlist/whitelist functionality as mailman uses for simplicity, though this was after migration.  You might need to modify the migration script to handle special posting rules differently, depending on your lists and how you managed them. See here if you want a copy of the modlist/whitelist plugin https://github.com/sshipway/sympa-6.2-plugins

Secondly, the migration script exports the list members, and then subsequently processes this export into Sympa. At the time we used it, the export functionality cached the last export and so would not re-export if it had previously done so - this was a problem as we ran an initial test migration a week before the live one, and it had cached the membership from the previous week... if it still does this, you might want to modify the script to always export regardless of if there is a preexisting export file.

Thirdly, the migrated archives needed to be modified slightly as Sympa's default configuration stripped several tags and items from the archived emails that our users wanted to keep (mailto links, and http/s links, for example). The standard migration worked, but our users wanted an archive that looked similar. We were also able to use mod_rewrite in the apache frontend to preserve the old mailman archive URLs and map them into the Sympa archive URLs, which was handy as many tickets contained links to mailing list archive entries. Sadly I don't have the rewrite rules handy any more :(

Hope this helps,

Steve

-- 

Steve Shipway | Senior Email Systems Administrator 
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