Migrating from Mailman to Google Groups

Migration Process

I've recently migrated a mailing list from a server running postfix + mailman to a google group with the idea
of ease of management and removing the need of having a physical server.

Someone asked me to comment on my thoughts on the migration via email, so I'm mostly sharing the same info for anyone who might have an interest.

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I retrieved the full listing of all emails from mailman via the CLI
> ./list_members <listname> > members.txt

Then login to the google groups interface paste the file in and invite all your members
to join the new mailing list.  I made the list moderated and set an autoreply to all incoming messages telling the members to join the google group.

I waited about a week or two for people to join and such... then I changed the DNS entries and moved the mail server to a google hosted domain.  I recreated a user with the previous list name...

so if my mailing list name was   javaFanBoys@foobar.com  I created a new user with that same
address and created a vacation message instructing the user that the old email list has moved over.

In my case I had an announce list for events that forwarded all its emails to the more general list.

I haven't figured out how to make it broadcast to all users though there is an archiver email that takes whatever email it receives and treats it as if it was a regular email to the list in all regards except the fact
that it doesn't send it out as an email to the user base.  (ie visible via web view but not via email)

Under your groups advanced setting you'll have an email along these lines:  listname+garchive-###@googlegroups.com.  So I created a new account again named bot, which is subscribed to both lists, and any emails received from my -announce list gets forward to the email address listed above.

Motivation


The reason I decided to move over was for:

1. easier management and delegating admins/moderators and such
2. removing required infrastructure
3. migrate the main website to sites.google.com 
4. consolidated callendar of events of various associated groups in the area 

I don't like having to rely on a single person who has the master password to make any major changes.  The delegation of rights via google is a lot easier.  You can setup email distribution groups like info@domain or help@domain to allow everyone to be involved and informed.

Problems

Here are the current limitations of google groups.

1. There is no easy way of importing old posts short of re-emailing all the history to the list. 
2. It's difficult to forward emails from one group to another and have it be broadcasted to users.
3. sites.google.com is great for simple content, but if you want to edit html or do anything remotely fancy it is very limiting.