How to export mailman mailinglist subscribers

There is no built-in function to export the mailinglist subscriber in mailman. If you want to migrate to another software or move to another mailman installation you are in need to export the subscribers. I found this to be the easiest way:

1. Log in to your mailman mailinglist administration panel, like http://hostname/cgi-bin/mailman/admin/mylist
2. Replace “admin” with “roster” in the URL in the address bar and press enter, like http://hostname/cgi-bin/mailman/roster/mylist
3. The subscribers are listed in a bulleted list with the @ sign replaced by ” at “. Mark the list in the browser, right click the selection and “Copy”
4. Open a plain text editor, like notepad if you are running Windows (avoid Word, Wordpad, LibreOffice writer etc since you will also paste a lot of text attributes in those editors, use a plain text editor)
5. Right click in the editor and select “Paste”
6. Search and replace, normally by pressing CTRL-H. Search for ” at ” and replace it with “@” (without the “”) and click “Replace all”.
7. Save the file

If you are moving the subscriber list into another mailman installation:

1. In the text editor above, right click and “Select all” to select all text (the list of the subscribers) and then right click and “Copy”
2. In the administration panel of the new mailman installation, click on “Membership management“
3. Click on “Add new members to the list“
4. In the top box where you can type email addresses one per line, right click and “Paste”
5. Set “Send welcome message to new members” to “No” (unless you really want mailman to send an email welcoming all the subsrcibers you are adding)
6. Click “Save” in the bottom of the page