Mailman 3 June 1998 - Mailman-Developers

Oops..
by Corbett J. Klempay June 17, 1998

June 17, 1998

I guess you guys should probably disregard that last Qmail message I sent...I had forgotten that I had sent out a similar message probably about a week and a half - 2 weeks ago... If anyone HAS gotten the aliases cooking with Qmail, please let me know. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Corbett J. Klempay Quote of the Week: http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay "Economists are still trying to figure out why the girls with the least principle draw the most interest." PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7 347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Mailman + Qmail 1.01
by Corbett J. Klempay June 17, 1998

June 17, 1998

Anyone in here done this / know if it works? I even tried installing the fastforward package for Qmail to give it /etc/aliases support...but it's being really damn annoying (i.e. in its current state, mail sent to an alias from /etc/aliases is getting swallowed into nowhere; it never shows up on the Qmail machine (at least not in the Mailbox), and doesn't bounce either...) I forget who it was who was running it, but on a related note...anyone know how VMailer is coming along? I was reviewing the pages for it...looks promising. (I want to get our ACM off of sendmail, but Qmail seems like I'd be dealing with a bunch of transitionary problems...) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Corbett J. Klempay Quote of the Week: http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay "Economists are still trying to figure out why the girls with the least principle draw the most interest." PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7 347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Bounce processing and remote list administrators
by Janne Sinkkonen June 16, 1998

June 16, 1998

Well, I'm not sure it's quite as smooth as it could be. Our network connection tends to go down for the weekend because of a broken router needing (ir)relegular reboots. This happened on Sunday once again, and this time the remote listowner got over 100MB worth of error messages. His ISP will filter the trash out of his mailbox for tomorrow, hopefully. Furthermore, about 150 of roughly 800 members were kicked out of the list because of 'excessive or fatal bounces'. The network was down for about 24 hours. (Our bounce parameters may be too tight, of course.) I haven't seen the variety of the generated messages yet. Even if this were 'normal' in the sense that there are no message-generating loops, some kind of solution is needed to prevent excessive or fatal mail bombing of the listowners. -- Janne

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: bounce agressiveness
by Janne Sinkkonen June 15, 1998

June 15, 1998

John Viega <viega(a)list.org> writes: > I do like the idea of sending daily mail for actually an extended > period of time. Maybe it could be every 3rd day for 60 days, since > mail generally doesn't get rejected as undeliverable for 3 days. We > could use the confirmation mechanism to let people get back on the > list. Or by an exponential schedule, say after 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64 days. Why? Well, less trying, and because recovery of an address becomes more and more improbable when time passes (most network problems are short in duration). -- Janne

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Idea
by Corbett J. Klempay June 15, 1998

June 15, 1998

Hey, I just saw the comment about integrating archive search functionality in 1.0 or another not-so-distant release. I was thinking that maybe I could use this as a chance to learn Python; I just finished taking Info Retrieval & Text Understanding this past semester, and ended up doing a vector search engine for the final project. I'm not saying that I can for sure do this; I think I might see if I can find some time to screw around with it, and if it develops ok, then bonus. Some questions, though: - how big of an archive should this be scalable to? I'm thinking this because some models (like the vector model used for my project) get good accuracy, but suck as far as resource usage (like our engine dealt with ~2000 text documents from an online database and would suck up ~80 MB of RAM per query, and would take almost 20 seconds just to load the pre-indexed document clusters from disk; the query itself only takes like 1-2 seconds on a K6-233, but the startup time of 15+ seconds blows). With large corpa, it might be necessary to implement some persistence; it just takes so annoyingly long to load even pre-indexed stuff from disk (and our queries were on a K6-233 with 128 MB; heheh...think how a P-90 with 32 MB would fare :) (or worse yet!) (for the really curious people, the engine is at http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/projects/calliope) - What kind of structure does Pipermail store the archive in? Maybe I should contact someone (maybe whoever runs the lists at python.org?) who runs a larger Pipermail archive and see about getting an archive of a treefull of archived articles - Did you have any idea about what kind of search interface? Were you thinking a text field with Boolean capability, or just letting them throw some words in the field and see what sticks? - Were you thinking of an engine that has an indexing process that runs via a cron job or something, or something much simpler? (like one that just brute force searches through the text of the archives for each query; that would be slow as hell if the archive was large, but would take no additional disk space and wouldn't really require persistence). ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Corbett J. Klempay Quote of the Week: http://www2.acm.jhu.edu/~cklempay "Economists are still trying to figure out why the girls with the least principle draw the most interest." PGP Fingerprint: 7DA2 DB6E 7F5E 8973 A8E7 347B 2429 7728 76C2 BEA1 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] mass subscribe bug
by Scott June 14, 1998

June 14, 1998

I saw this error once in another context (still with mailman and cookies, but with the "private" cgi). The error occurred when a recent version of IE on a mac attempted to deal with the cookie. I think that the bug has one of two causes: either the browser is incorrectly handling the characters in the cookie, or there is something about the way that the base64 module encodes and decodes that won't work with http. Since I've only seen the error on what i consider a questionable browser i suspect that it's the browser's fault. in either case, i haven't the first clue about a fix. scott On Sat, Jun 13, 1998 at 08:15:49AM -0700, John Viega wrote: | Here's the error previously mentioned, as reported to me, w/ excess | headers, etc. trimmed. | | John | | ----- Forwarded message from Matt Chatterley <matt(a)mpc.dyn.ml.org> ----- | | Occurs when trying to mass subscribe. | | Seems to have started after upgrading python, version information: | | Python 1.5.1 (#1, May 29 1998, 12:50:41) [GCC 2.7.2.3] on linux2 | | We're sorry, we hit a bug! | | If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy | of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what | happened. Thanks! | | Traceback (innermost last): | File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 823, in ? | main() | File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 157, in main | is_auth = isAuthenticated(lst) | File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 103, in isAuthenticated | inp = base64.decodestring(c[list_name + "-admin"].value) | File "/usr/lib/python1.5/base64.py", line 46, in decodestring | decode(f, g) | File "/usr/lib/python1.5/base64.py", line 32, in decode | s = binascii.a2b_base64(line) | Error: Incorrect padding | | _______________________________________________ | Mailman-Developers maillist - Mailman-Developers(a)python.org | http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers -----End of forwarded message-----

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flock again
by John Viega June 14, 1998

June 14, 1998

The flock.py I posted had a subtle name collision problem that reminds me how much I like static type checking. Attached is a fix. I've now hooked it up to the main source tree, and have integrated Mike McLay's wrapping stuff. John

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Re: [JPython] rexec module, string escapes and file ASCII<->Unicode
by Barry A. Warsaw June 13, 1998

June 13, 1998

>>>>> "JH" == Jim Hugunin <hugunin(a)cnri.reston.va.us> writes on the >>>>> jpython-interest list: JH> Everybody on this list should know that the mailman software - JH> which handles the jpython-interest mailing list - is JH> reasonably agressive in suspending mail to any addresses that JH> produce excessive bounce messages. This feature makes the JH> life of the list administrator much more pleasant, but can JH> occasionally lead to people having their mail suspended who JH> still want to be on the list. I've been thinking about bounce policy. I wonder if what Mailman should do is have the same policy for all bounces, regardless of whether it looks permanent (user unknown) or not. Once the bounce threshold is reached and the account is disabled, a cron job could be used to retry the address for some number of days. If the account becomes live again, it can be re-enabled. Or perhaps the user has to explicitly re-enable it when they finally see these warning messages. -Barry

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Archiving?
by John Viega June 13, 1998

June 13, 1998

I got several messages dated June 12 from Barry yesterday, but none of them showed up in the pipermail archive for this list. Anyone guess what's up? John

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mass subscribe bug
by John Viega June 13, 1998

June 13, 1998

Here's the error previously mentioned, as reported to me, w/ excess headers, etc. trimmed. John ----- Forwarded message from Matt Chatterley <matt(a)mpc.dyn.ml.org> ----- Occurs when trying to mass subscribe. Seems to have started after upgrading python, version information: Python 1.5.1 (#1, May 29 1998, 12:50:41) [GCC 2.7.2.3] on linux2 We're sorry, we hit a bug! If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what happened. Thanks! Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 823, in ? main() File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 157, in main is_auth = isAuthenticated(lst) File "/home/mailman/scripts/admin", line 103, in isAuthenticated inp = base64.decodestring(c[list_name + "-admin"].value) File "/usr/lib/python1.5/base64.py", line 46, in decodestring decode(f, g) File "/usr/lib/python1.5/base64.py", line 32, in decode s = binascii.a2b_base64(line) Error: Incorrect padding

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