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So I have been trying to remove a user from one of our Sympa mailing lists, and can't for the life of me get it to stick. I have deleted the entry for the user under /var/sympa/lists/listname/subscribers.db, I have set myself to both sympa admin and list admin and tried to send the unsubscribe user command via email, each time being told I don't have permission, and of course we don't have http access set up and there isn't a cli command to delete a user. Does anyone have any ideas?

Chris Kennard
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    What version of sympa are you using? What's the exact command you're sending by email? What appears in the sympa log file when that fails? You should be able to delete users as list admin (and possibly sympa admin but that depends on the scenario applied to list). – Paul Haldane May 08 '15 at 15:25
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    We are using version 4.1.2 of sympa. I am sending "unsubscribe mesd-all" from the email I want to unsubscribe and "unsubscribe mesd-all chp@mesd.k12.or.us" from the admin email. Both times it says I don't have permission! – Chris Kennard May 11 '15 at 21:55
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    What's the exact log message that appears in `sympa.log` when you try to unsubscribe as the list member? – Paul Haldane May 11 '15 at 22:10
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    What unsubscribe scenario is in place for the list? The default in our installation (v6) lets list owners remove addresses immediately but requires confirmation from list members (though I don't see how the scenario allows list owners to do this). – Paul Haldane May 11 '15 at 22:24

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The list is most likely configured to not allow self-unsubscription. This is why you cannot unsubscribe by email.

The list of users is held in the database, and so - if you are unable to use the web interface to manage the subscribers - you would need to delete the appropriate record from the subscriber_table.

If this list uses an external datasource for the users, then you may need to instead add the user to the exclusion_table as otherwise they will be re-added on the next synchronisation.

Having said all of that, you are using a very old (4.x) version of Sympa, and it may predate some of this advice which is based from knowledge of 5.x and 6.x.

Steve Shipway
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