The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

["Shweta Patil (Staff)" <address@concealed>]

Hi David,

Many thanks for the reply and suggestion.

Perl script would be useful. Thanks in advance

Regards,
Shweta

-----Original Message-----
From: David Carter <address@concealed> 
Sent: 03 February 2026 18:35
To: Shweta Patil (Staff) <address@concealed>; address@concealed
Subject: Re: [en@sympa] Unsubscribe leavers from Sympa mailing lists

CAUTION: External Email


On 03/02/2026 10:09, 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.

Sympa collects the bounces and will automatically unsubscribe people from 
lists when they reach certain thresholds. However this may take some time. 
List managers shouldn't (directly) see the bounces at all.

> 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?

You can use:

/usr/sbin/sympa dump --roles=owner,editor,member ${listname}\@${DOMAIN}

to dump the current state of a list into three files, for example:

$ cd /var/lib/sympa/list_data/test-dpc22
$ ls -l *.dump
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa   0 Aug 13 08:01 editor.dump
-rw-r----- 1 sympa sympa 419 Aug 13 08:01 member.dump
-rw-r--r-- 1 sympa sympa 245 Jan 21 08:53 owner.dump

You can then pipe a list of email addresses into stdin for:

/usr/sbin/sympa del --quiet --role=${role} ${listname}\@${DOMAIN}

in order to remove specific email addresses from the list of members (owners, 
editors) for each list.

I have a little Perl script to combine these two things and send a running 
commentary to the list owners for each list. I'm happy to share that. However 
you would need to customise that for your environment.

--
David Carter                             Email: address@concealed
University of Cambridge,
Information Services,
7 J J Thomson Avenue,
Cambridge UK.  CB3 0RB