Mailinglist Moderator

This is just a small program to make moderating mailinglists while on the road a bit easier. If you're like me and don't like them to clutter up your mailbox, at least.

The program will simply enumerate all pending moderation requests and let you approve or reject them.

At this point, only posts are moderated, not subscription requests.

Installing

Note! You are advised to install the program from the Android Market where it's available for free. There are some APKs available for download from the github page, but all updates are not always published there. The source always is, of course, just not the prebuilt APKs.

Setting up a list

To add a new mailinglist, hit the Menu key and select Servers.... Hit Menu again, and select New server. In the window that shows up, enter the name of the mailinglist. (Yes, there is some confusion of terms here, but this is the name of the list, not the server).

When you've done this, you will be sent back to the main screen, and your list will show up as unconfigured (in a future improved version, you should end up directly at the list configuration page here). To configure the details, hit the Menu key, and select Servers (again). Now click on the new server to go into the configuration page for it, where you can enter the base URL and the password.

If you have one or more existing servers, you can easily duplicate them by clicking and holding on the name of the server and choose copy. This will copy the base url and password, but give you a chance to enter a new name for the list. This is particularly useful if you have a "site-wide" administration password that will grant you access to all lists.

Base URLs

The base url should be set to the root of the list server management URL. It will be different depending on which list manager is used. Note that the base url does not include the name of the list.

Mailman

For mailman, the base url is typically http://lists.domain.com/mailman/admindb.

Majordomo2

For majordomo2, the base url is typically http://lists.domain.com/mj/mj_wwwadm.

Importing and exporting

You can import and export your list of servers to a XML file from the menu. This file will be placed in the /sdcard/ folder, so you can use any program to edit or transfer it. Note that there is no real validation done when importing, so if the XML file has an invalid format or content, the program is likely to just crash instead of giving an error message.

SSL

In it's default mode, Mailinglist Moderator will rely on the Android system to validate the certificate of the server connected to, if the URL starts with https. There are two settings to override this (per server), if you are using a certificate that doesn't validate properly:

Non-standard SSL hostname: This setting is used if the certificate has a different hostname than the URL, but otherwise validates fine. A typical example of this is overloading hostnames, so the certificate is for www.domain.com, but the list server is responding to lists.domain.com. In this case, put www.domain.com in settings as Non-standard SSL hostname.
Accept invalid certificate: This setting is used when the certificate on the server simply does not validate. This could be because it's a self signed certificate, because the CA signing it is not known, because it has expired, or any other reasons. The configuration is set to the SHA-1 fingerprint of the certificate, and any server that presents this fingerprint will be accepted. When you enter this setting, the current certificate will automatically be downloaded and presented, and you can press a button to copy the fingerprint to the setting, once you have verified that it's correct. Note that you will have to set the Non-standard SSL hostname setting as well as this one, in case the name on the certificate doesn't match.

Moderating

When the application starts it will enumerate all unmoderated emails on all the lists, and the main view will show how many unmoderated messages there are on the list. The entries will be sorted so that the list with the largest amount of pending moderation requests is listed on top.

To moderate the entries on a list, just click the list from the main view. This will give a list of all the emails pending on this list, the sender of them and the subject. To view the contents of the mail, just click the mail.

To moderate an individual email, click-hold on it and choose to reject or approve it. You can also hit the Menu key and from the popup menu choose to reject or approve all messages at once.

Once you're satisfied with the status of the messages, hit the Menu key and select Apply moderation. This will call out to the server and make the actual moderation changes.

Depending on mailinglist manager this will be a single operation (for mailman) or a sequence of one operation for each message (majordomo2), and may in the majordomo2 case take a while if it's a lot of emails to be moderated.

Common issues

The mailinglist software to be in English - localized versions don't work.

vijayeluri / mailinglistmoderator Goto Github PK