How to export Cpanel's Mailman mailing list

Trying to export your Mailman subscriber list?

Cpanel's Mailman mailing list software is not all that bad for an open-source application.  It provides quite a bit of flexibility when it comes to managing and administering your mailing list and its subscribers.  The glaring problem?  There is no easy way to export your list of subscribers!  Here's how to do it.

How to export Mailman subscriber lists to .csv file

Let me start off by saying that in order to successfully export your Mailman subscriber list, you're going to need shell (SSH) access.  In a VPS or dedicated server environment, you have this automatically.  In a shared environment, you can ask your hosting provider to give you SSH access, or, if they refuse to, to please export the mailing list for you.

1. Log into your account via SSH as root user.
2. Find your Mailman directory (usually located in /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/bin)
3. Execute the following command to copy the Mailman mailing list subscribers to a text file: ./list_members LISTNAME > ./subscribers.txt (where LISTNAME is the name of your subscriber list (if your subscriber list is list@example.com, the LISTNAME would be list_example.com)
4. This will effectively copy your email subscribers into subscribers.txt, placing one email per line.
5. Finally, you'll want to copy the file to a directory accessible via FTP so you can download it, with the following command: cp subscribers.txt /home/username/ (if you copy it to /home/username/public_html you can point a web browser to the file to view or download it)

Importing your mailing list into another service

You may need to convert your mailing list file (.txt) to a .csv (Comma Separated Value) file for import into certain mailing list applications.  You can accomplish this by simply changing its extension from .txt to .csv.  Some mailing list applications, such as that offered by Mailtrust.com (excellent email company, in business since 1999 - please mention Alex from contractwebdevelopment.com if you sign up!) will also take first and last name in the .csv file.  For example, if your subscribers.csv file contains on one line:

first@example.com

You can add first and last name like this:

first@example.com, first, last

Voila :)  Hopefully you were able to successfully export your Mailman mailing list subscriber list (and even better, we can hope that one day a version of Mailman will offer this export functionality in Cpanel).