cPanel/Mailman errors: could not determine list owner...

275 words, 1 mins

Much as I hate messing around with the core files of cPanel (or of any other installation in fact), the cPanel installation has a bug that, although not a showstopper, is rather annoying. It results in me getting an email every few hours full of lines like this:
Could not determine list owner for xxxxx
This is caused by the update\_mailman\_cache script checking the names of the Mailman mailing lists and finding them wrongly named. This is easily fixed and I’m writing this as much as a reminder for myself, as to help others with the problem.The update\_mailman\_cache script gets a list of valid domain names and user accounts then checks the Mailman mailing lists against them. The script is expecting the list names to be in a particular format and, these being lists from a long time ago, they are not. So every list check fails the test and a line is added to the error report.
The fix is easy. In /usr/local/cpanel/scripts/update\_mailman\_cache, find line 57 and change $list = '' to $list = 'root'. This makes all the lists to be owned by root if no other owner is found. And, as far as I can tell, the only side effect is that all ‘un-owned’ lists will have their quota added to that of the root user.
The cPanel folks know about this, but it is debatable whether it is a bug or a feature. It would be nice to have someway to disable the check without having to hack the core files though.

I hope this helps anyone else with the same problem.