mailman-admin-helper: Mildly Easier Mailman Spam Management

April 30, 2017 mozilla

Mozilla hosts a few Mailman instances¹, and I run a few mailing lists on them. Our interface for managing incoming spam is... okay.

The form inputs are tiny. And it takes, like, 3 clicks to discard and blacklist spam per-sender. And, because I only learned about the options for filtering by spam headers within the past month, I had to use this interface on a daily basis for years.

Finally, about a year or so ago, I got fed up and wrote a bookmarklet that auto-clicked every form element needed to discard and blacklist every email on the page. Since it's rare for the lists I moderate to get legitimate emails that are marked for moderation, I didn't need anything more complex.

However, we recently updated our Mailman pages to use CSP, specifically the script-src none directive. Because the pages no longer accept any URL as valid for script execution, my bookmarklet stopped working. I searched online for workarounds and didn't find anything informative².

Luckily, I happen to have experience making WebExtensions that inject content scripts into web pages. It's as simple as creating a manifest.json file:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "name": "mailman-admin-helper",
  "version": "0.1.1",
  "applications": {
    "gecko": {
      "id": "mailman-admin-helper@mkelly.me"
    }
  },

  "description": "Adds useful shortcuts to Mozilla Mailman admin.",

  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
        "*://mail.mozilla.org/admindb/*",
        "*://lists.mozilla.org/admindb/*"
      ],
      "js": ["index.js"],
      "css": ["index.css"]
    }
  ]
}

The content_scripts key is where the magic happens. List some domains, write some JavaScript and CSS, and you're done! The web-ext tool makes testing, building, and signing the extension pretty painless.

An hour or two later, and I had finished my new WebExtension, mailman-admin-helper. After it is installed, the admin interface is greatly simplified:

The block of checkboxes and radio buttons has been replaced by 4 buttons that immediately make their changes and refresh the page when clicked. And if you need to inspect and modify an individual email, you can still click through the email subject to get to the normal moderation page.

Granted, it cuts out a lot of functionality, but this extension is mostly meant for myself to use. Pull requests are welcome, though, in case anyone wants to add functionality that they commonly use.

Big thanks to the Add-ons team and community for making WebExtensions super-easy to use!

I'm not entirely sure why we have two, but it's cool. ↩
I did find bug 866522, which discusses the reason bookmarklets don't work with CSP, as well as some proposed fixes to Firefox and the (in my opinion, correct) wisdom that bookmarklets are a dead-end anyway. ↩

mailman-admin-helper: Mildly Easier Mailman Spam Management

Footnotes