The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Mail administrator, Otto Makela" <address@concealed>]

On 03/02/2026 12.09, Shweta Patil (Staff) wrote:

> We are looking at deleting the leavers accounts.  We are worried
> that we will get lots of bounces/NDRs when the mailing list gets an
> email after the leavers accounts are deleted as these accounts will
> still be part of the mailing lists they were subscribed to.
>
> We would like to know what is the best possible way to avoid this
> i.e.   if the person is member of multiple Sympa mailing lists,  is
> there any way we can “unsubscribe” these members in bulk using
> command line or otherwise pls?
>
> There is an option from web to “Unsubscribe the User” as a list
> master but that is one user at a time.

I would recommend looking at automating the lists (populating them
eg. from LDAP) so people are automatically unsubscribed as they leave.

This unfortunately will of course require that you have some kind
of user management / identity management software deployed.
Yes, that is a big ask.

In addition to this, I've written a small script to query the
databases on our Sympa list servers and do lookups of the form

SELECT * FROM subscriber_table WHERE user_subscriber=$user
SELECT * FROM admin_table WHERE user_admin=$user
SELECT * FROM exclusion_table WHERE user_exclusion=$user

So I can locate users that have been manually subscribed, made admins
or have been excluded from lists, so I can remove these when they leave.

--
address@concealed (Mail Administrator, Otto J. Makela)