There are currently a Mailman list (wmse-kontor＠styrelse.wikimedia.se) and a Google Groups list (kansli＠wikimedia.se). They have been used somewhat parallel lately, the former more so than the other.
To switch we need to:
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T195596 WMSE e-mail restructure | |||
| Resolved | Sebastian_Berlin-WMSE | T305677 Document e-mail list migration | |||
| Resolved | Sebastian_Berlin-WMSE | T304157 Switch office mailing list to Google Groups | |||
| Resolved | Sebastian_Berlin-WMSE | T305237 Ensure e-mails from Google Groups can be exported |
As long as the old address is also a re-direct I would say that it should work. I struggle to come up with a scenario where someone is "staff enough" to be on the e-mail list but not "staff enough" to have access to the shared Google drives etc.
Need to remember that this mailing list should not be open to email from the outside.
Looks like the migration is doable with https://github.com/XaviTorello/mail2googlegroup. It requires a project in https://console.cloud.google.com/.
I did a test run with a few messages from the office list to test.group@ and it seems to have worked fine.
To get the client id and client secret do this in the Cloud Platform dashboard:
There are lots of things in the dashboard so searching is the easiest way to find what you need.
After some testing it seems that e-mails added through the API does not get sent to members. Maybe this is fine or indeed what we want, since this means you don't get e-mails from before you were added to the list (but can still access them in Groups).
I've used Python's mailbox module to compare the Groups archive with the imported Mailman one. In the end I managed to get a Group export that matched the one from Mailman. "Matched" here means there are no messages in the Mailman MBOX that are not also in the Groups MBOX.
There were a few weird things:
I confirmed that using recipient maps for sending copies works as we want. I made two maps, one from Groups to Mailman and one the other way. Both have "Also route to original destination" enabled. Sending an e-mail to either address also sends a copy to the other, but doesn't create an infinite loop🙂
I had a look through the group settings and most of permissions are now set to "Group members". This shouldn't cause any issues since its internal. I set "Who can post as the group" and the moderation options to "Group managers", just to people doing anything by mistake.
For Mailman to be happy I had to add the new list as an alias under "Privacy options..." -> "Recipient filters". Otherwise the emails were held for moderation.
Would you mind setting up Google doc describing the import (and for the future also the export) procedure. My thinking is that we can add a rationale for the migration to the top then publish it to the wiki as a memo on why and how the migration was done (the export instructions making it clear that we are not locking ourselves into this choice forever).
Note to self: background arguments are over at T198679: Investigate switching internal mailing list over to GSuite group
Redirecting from Mailman -> Groups was not possible through recipient map sin Workspace, since it's a different domain. A quick and easy fix was to add the group as subscriber to the Mailman list. These seems to work and now sending to either list will send a copy to the other (and now strange loops occur).