archives are not working for new lists

[novadeviator]

As I wrote in the forum to the question:

Messages from Mailman lists should be monthly archived, but Mailman says that there is no archive since hundred posted messages for 6 months.

and

I had the same issue with mailman and I solved it by changing the owner of some archives directory (as far as I can remember) to allow mailman to write in. I’m sorry, I dit that a few months ago, I don’t remember the details

What I found out:

The permissions that seem to be wrong is that folders for archives (in /var/lib/mailman/archives/) are owned by www-data:www-data. Well at least some of them. When making a new list, the system created archive folders owned by www-data:www-data and then when mailman receives a first message that's supposed to be archived and wants to save it to that folder it cannot (there's no error), unless it is owned by list:www-data (user list and group www-data)

So there are two solutions:

• you change the owner of the folder (for example /var/lib/mailman/archives/your-new-list) to list (but not the group, group should stay www-data):

  $ sudo su
  # cd /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/
  # chown list:www-data your-new-list*

• you add user list to group www-data. after that even if the folder is owned by www-data, user list can write to it.

  $ sudo su
  # adduser list www-data
  # service mailman restart
  (maybe it also needs a reboot)

this seems pretty hacky, and should be solved in some other way, I think. i have no idea what security consequences this has.

maybe there's also a setting somewhere with what permissions are those archive folders created.

Something must be fixed in the installation so that archives work after it without those hacks.