The goal of this tool is to be able to ask users to reconfirm they want to be part of a mailing list. We do that by sending a email to each member of the list, asking to click on a link if they're still interested in being a member of the list.

Requirements

SQLite database

We create a sqlite table reconfirm.db with the following columns:

email
UUID
confirmed, defaults to 0

With this command:

create table reconfirm (id INT PRIMARY KEY, email TEXT NOT NULL, uuid TEXT, confirmed INTEGER default 0);

Dependencies

On debian run the following commands to install the script's dependencies:

apt-get install uuid-dev sqlite3
cpan install DBI Mojolicious DBD::SQLite UUID

Usage

Run the script:

perl reconfirm.pl daemon -m production -l http://[::]:3000

The program will create random UUID for each row in the sqlite database. We can after that create links to send to the mailing list members that look like this:

https://<host>:8000/reconfirm?ID=UUID

Generating confirmation links

Once the SQLite database is populated and the script has been running, generate the links with the script gen_links.pl. Put it in the same directory as the database, and then run it with:

perl gen_links.pl --host <hostname hosting the reconfirm-mailman service>

This will generate a file called links.csv with the association email <=> link. The links can be sent to the mailing list members.

Docker

Is it also possible to use the Dcokerfile directly. For this run:

docker build -t reconfirm-mailman https://git.fsfe.org/fsfe-system-hackers/mailman-reconfirm.git
docker run -v /path/to/sqlitereconfirm_db:/home/perlscript/mailman-reconfirm --name mailman-reconfirm -p 3000 reconfirm-mailman

Ansible

A playbook can be used to deploy the container remotely.

ansible-playbook playbook.yml -i lund.fsfeurope.org

Usage on the FSFE's Docker deployment

If deployed via the FSFE's Drone/Ansible/Docker toolchain, the usage of this tool will look like the following:

Create a list of the email addresses to be confirmed in /srv/mailman-reconfirm/data/, e.g. called mails.txt. It has to be one email per line.
Enter the docker container in which all necessary tools are already installed by docker exec -it mailman-reconfirm bash
In ~/mailman-reconfirm, execute the helper script with ./gen_database.sh data/mails.txt data/reconfirm.db. The script asks for each step. For a complete re-creation of the database, always enter y. Make sure you saved the old database to a safe place if it is still needed for another operation.
Enter the data subdirectory and execute perl ../gen_links.pl --host mailman-confirm.fsfe.org to create a file called links.csv.

The links.csv file is a comma-separated list of mail addresses with the confirmation links. You can use tools like the Thunderbird addon "Mail Merge" to auto-generate emails for each address with the respective link.

License

This software is copyright 2018 by the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. and licensed under the GPLv3 license. For details see the "LICENSE" file in the top level directory of https://git.fsfe.org/fsfe-system-hackers/mailman-reconfirm