[Techtalk] Unsubscribing a dodgy mail address from a Mailman list

[Mary]

Sorry about the terseness of this explanation -- if you don't know much
about HTTP this won't make any sense. I ended up fixing it by manually
sending data to my webserver, rather than letting my browser do it.

http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/ looks like a reasonable intro for
all the concepts I used here.

On Mon, Dec 08, 2003, Mary wrote:
> Unfortunately...  I subscribed "xxx at example.com yyy at example.net"[1] to
> the mailing list as a single address.
> 
> I am trying to unsubscribe it using the admin/MAILLIST/members page,
> but when I uncheck the "subscr" checkbox, it reports "xxx at example.com
> -- Not subscribed".

OK, I couldn't run the remove_members commandline script because I don't
have write permission to add the appropriate lock file.

I captured the HTTP request from my browser that was meant to
unsubscribe "xxx at example.com yyy at example.net" using socket[1], and
noticed that the POST request contained this string:

user=xxx%40example.com&xxx%40example.com+yyy%40example.net_plain=on

I changed it to this:

user=xxx%40example.com+yyy%40example.net&xxx%40example.com+yyy%40example.net_plain=on
                      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
                       the changed bit

telnetted to port 80 on the webserver myself, and sent that as the post
request. Fixed!

-Mary

[1] To do this, type "socket -l -s <port>" (where <port> is some number
--- 10000 or 20000 would be OK choices here) on the command line of some
host, and then set your browser's HTTP proxy to be the hostname of that
host and whatever port you chose. socket will print the HTTP request for
you.  Make sure you reset the proxy afterwards!