Question

I have to develop a .Net application in which i have to add or remove a user from Mailman mailing list.My Question is whether there is any .Net connector or Dll to connect to mailman mailing list using .Net.

Answer 1

Edit (9/21/14): I have just released a NuGet package for manipulating most aspects of a Mailman v2 list via HTTP calls. https://www.nuget.org/packages/MailmanSharp/

I’m not aware of any existing component to do this, but since the Mailman interface is all on the web, you can “control” it with HttpWebRequest; I recently wrote a small app which can retrieve the subscriber list, subscribe/unsubscribe people, and set individual flags like moderate/nomail/etc. It takes a little poking around in the source of the Mailman pages to see what variables need to be set in the POST, and some trial and error. I suggest setting up a temp Mailman list just to play with.

In order to do most of this, you’ll need a persistent CookieContainer that you can hook up to your different HttpWebRequests; the first call is a POST to the admin page with the admin password to set the session cookie that gives you access to the other pages.

Some of the POSTs are regular application/x-www-form-urlencoded types, but some are also multipart/form-data. For the latter, I found some very helpful code at http://www.briangrinstead.com/blog/multipart-form-post-in-c I had to make a couple of changes so that I could pass in my CookieContainer

Here’s some sample code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Net;
using System.IO;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Data;
using System.Threading;

namespace UpdateListserv
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                File.Delete(_logFilename);
                Log(String.Format("Starting: {0}", DateTime.Now));
                Login();
                var roster = GetSubscribers();
                Unsubscribe(roster);
                string members = GetMemberEmails();
                Subscribe(members); 
                Unmoderate("[e-mail]");
                Log("Done");
            }

            catch(Exception e)
            {
                Log(e.Message);
            }
        }

        private static void Unmoderate(string email)
        {                
            Log("Unmoderating " + email);
            email = email.Replace("@", "%40");
            _vars.Clear();
            _vars["user"] = email;
            _vars[email + "_nomail"] = "off";
            _vars[email + "_nodupes"] = "on";
            _vars[email + "_plain"] = "on";
            _vars[email + "_language"] = "en";
            _vars["setmemberopts_btn"] = "Submit Your Changes";
            FormUpload.MultipartFormDataPost(_adminUrl + _membersPage, "foobar", _vars, _cookies);
        }

        private static CookieContainer _cookies = new CookieContainer();
        private static string _adminUrl = "http://mylist.com/admin.cgi/listname";
        private static string _rosterUrl = "http://mylist.com/roster.cgi/listname";
        private static string _pw = "myPassword";
        private static string _adminEmail = "[e-mail]";
        private static Dictionary<string, object> _vars = new Dictionary<string, object>();

        private static string _addPage = "/members/add";
        private static string _removePage = "/members/remove";
        private static string _membersPage = "/members";

        private static string _logFilename = "Update Listserv.log";

        private static void Log(string message)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(message);
            using (var log = File.AppendText(_logFilename))
                log.WriteLine(message);
        }


        private static void Subscribe(string members)
        {
            // members is a list of email addresses separated by \n
            Log("Subscribing everyone");
            _vars.Clear();
            _vars["subscribees"] = members;
            _vars["subscribe_or_invite"] = 0;
            _vars["send_welcome_msg_to_this_batch"] = 0;
            _vars["send_notifications_to_list_owner"] = 0;
            FormUpload.MultipartFormDataPost(_adminUrl + _addPage, "foobar", _vars, _cookies);
        }

        private static string GetMemberEmails()
        {
            // This method retrieves a list of emails to be 
            // subscribed from an external source
            // and returns them as a string with \n in between.
        }

        private static void Unsubscribe(string roster)
        {
            // roster is a list of email addresses separated by \n
            Log("Unsubscribing everybody");
            _vars.Clear();
            _vars["unsubscribees"] = roster;
            _vars["send_unsub_ack_to_this_batch"] = 0;
            _vars["send_unsub_notifications_to_list_owner"] = 0;
            FormUpload.MultipartFormDataPost(_adminUrl + _removePage, "foobar", _vars, _cookies);
        }

        private static string GetSubscribers()
        {
            // returns a list of email addresses subscribed to the list,
            // separated by \n
            Log("Getting subscriber list");
            var req = GetWebRequest(_rosterUrl);
            req.Method = "post";
            _vars.Clear();
            _vars["roster-email"] = _adminEmail;
            _vars["roster-pw"] = _pw;

            var rosterLines = GetResponseString(req).Split('\n').Where(l => l.StartsWith("<li>"));
            Log(String.Format("Got {0} subscribers", rosterLines.Count()));

            var roster = new List<string>();
            var regex = new Regex("<a.*>(.*)</a>");

            foreach (var line in rosterLines)
            {
                roster.Add(regex.Match(line).Groups[1].Value.Replace(" at ", "@"));
            }

            return String.Join("\n", roster);
        }

        private static void Login()
        {
            Log("Logging in to list admin panel");
            var req = GetWebRequest(_adminUrl);
            req.Method = "post";
            _vars["adminpw"] = _pw;
            SetPostVars(req);
            req.GetResponse();
        }

        private static HttpWebRequest GetWebRequest(string url)
        {
            var result = HttpWebRequest.Create(url) as HttpWebRequest;
            result.AllowAutoRedirect = true;
            result.CookieContainer = _cookies;
            result.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";

            return result;
        }

        private static string GetResponseString(HttpWebRequest req)
        {
            using (var res = req.GetResponse())
            using (var stream = res.GetResponseStream())
            using (var sr = new StreamReader(stream))
            {
                return sr.ReadToEnd();
            }
        }

        private static void SetPostVars(HttpWebRequest req)
        {
            var list = _vars.Select(v => String.Format("{0}={1}", v.Key, v.Value));

            using (var stream = req.GetRequestStream())
            using (var writer = new StreamWriter(stream))
            {
                writer.Write(String.Join("&", list));
            }
        }
    }
}