I learned about the Mailman check_perms program today. Basically it reports on permission issues with the mailman database, which is good because I was having trouble with the permissions on the mailman database. Basically email for a new list wasn’t being added to the web archive because the right permissions weren’t in place to allow the mailman process to write there. Anyway, with the help of /usr/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms and the judicious use of “chgrp -h list” and “chown -R -h www-data:list” I think I managed to fix everything up.

Update: I had a problem after applying the above changes whereby I couldn’t access the web archive for Mailman lists anymore. But… I figured out how to fix it. Basically I added the www-data to the list group with the following command (and then rebooted):

 sudo adduser www-data list