Hello,


tl;dr: https://lists-next.wikimedia.org is running mailman3. Please help us test the software before we upgrade the real mailing list server.


Kunal and I have been working on deploying the new mailman (version 3) to replace mailman2 serving https://lists.wikimedia.org and powering all of our mailing lists.


Mailman2 is a dinosaur that should have gone extinct years ago. Pretty old user interface (especially for admins and moderators), storing passwords in plain text, lack of any database (everything is file on disk), pretty old code, lack of ability to search in archives or send email from web interface, running on EOL python (python2), encoding issues with non-Latin languages, hard to redact archives, and the list goes on and on.


The new version has been developed/puppetized/tested in the Cloud and is now ready for proper testing! Give it a try: https://lists-next.wikimedia.org. We have created some mailing lists you can join and can test. If you want to test the experience as a list administrator/moderator, we can give those permissions out as well.


WARNING: All data on the lists-next server will be deleted after the test period is over.


We will also need help updating documentation on wikis and elsewhere.


If you find any bugs/issues (yay!), please file a ticket in the “Wikimedia-Mailing-lists” Phabricator project and we’ll check it out.


In the coming days/weeks will also import some public mailing lists from the old version to the new version to check archive size, search index size, and other aspects. There are other TODOs left as well like monitoring, logging, anti-abuse, etc.


Slowly and after testing (hopefully soon), we expect to deploy this on lists.wikimedia.org and mailing lists one by one or in batches can be upgraded to the 21st century.


The overall task tracking this project is T52864 and a big thank you people who are helping this move forward.


Regards,

Kunal and Amir