[Mailman-Users] [Fwd: Error: "Bad owner email address:mailman@(unused)" in SuSE 10.1] (solved)

[Mark Sapiro]

Jacques Dailey wrote:
>
>I set up Mailman as described in the README.SuSE documentation included 
>in the install package.  Everything seemed to be going fine until I got 
>to step 4. ". . . call "/usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist mailman" to create 
>the master mailing list".  Doing so resulted in the error "Bad owner 
>email address: mailman@(unused).


In off list communication, we determined that the SuSE Mailman package
sets DEFAULT_URL_HOST and DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST to '(unused)' in
Defaults.py. In this case, these bogus values had not been overridden
in mm_cfg.py.

Thus, when bin/newlist called the MailList.MailList.Create() method to
create the list, it attempted to validate the list posting address via
Mailman.Utils.ValidateEmail(). The posting address which Create()
attempted to validate was 'mailman@(unused)' because of the value of
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST.

Normally, if there is a problem with the list name which results in an
invalid posting address, ValidateEmail() raises a
Mailman.Errors.MMBadEmailError which is caught in Create() which
raises a Mailman.Errors.BadListNameError which newlist reports as a
bad listname.

In this case, the parentheses in the domain caused ValidateEmail() to
raise Mailman.Errors.MMHostileAddress instead which isn't caught in
Create() and passes to newlist which interprets it as a problem with
the owner address, thus the misleading error message from newlist.

The solution was to define DEFAULT_URL_HOST and DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST with
proper domain names in mm_cfg.py.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan