Yet another “note to self” type post. I was just fumbling around with Mailman, and for some reason the web frontend was always redirecting me to http://foo.com, while I had been working on the options at http://www.foo.com. For some other reason that I didn’t really look into, even though my server redirects foo.com to www.foo.com anyway, no changes were persisted that way.

I was additionally confused because my mm_cfg.py configures the default url host to www.foo.com explicitly. I tried hacking around in the DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN, which has a %s placeholder, but when I took that out and replaced with www.foo.com directly, I got an error in the web frontend.

After a while I found out that the url host is in fact configured with the list (not entirely sure what purpose this serves – seems to me like a per-machine config would suffice). More importantly, contrary to appearances the DEFAULT_URL_HOST set up in mm_cfg.py doesn’t seem to play any role in this whatsoever. Previously I had set up my new list like this:

newlist mylist@foo.com owner@foo.com

I fixed my problem now by configuring the url host explicitly on list creation:

rmlist -a mylist
newlist -u www.foo.com mylist@foo.com owner@foo.com

Weird, but apparently necessary.