Mailman 3 January 1999 - Mailman-Developers

Object ideas for duplicate supression
by Christopher G. Petrilli 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

yeah yeah, I know ... it's me again... here's some ideas for Mailman2, and note these objects could be stored in a nice fancy object database :-) ---- ramblings begin Ok, here's the 5 minute concept... think of it as modeling-light. Two types of objects: * List object * Subscriber object There is a many-many relationship between Lists and Subscribers, meaning obviously that Lists can contain many subscribers, and Subscribers can contain many lists. This creates a concern for clean-up given circular references. Need to think through this.[1] Now, the best way to understand this is to deal with a message coming in, and how does it get exploded into the subscribers necessary: First, you know who the mailer sent it to (say listA), but then you parse through the To:/CC: headers looking for other lists, making a note of them. If there are no other lists (local lists, not remote lists) identified then proceed with the normal delivery, no reason here to compare Message-Id: with those stored. However, if another local list is discovered (listB) then duplicate-supression should be run. What this requires is exploding the message into all of its subscribers, and matching that with the subscribers of listB, if no overlap, short-circuit to normal delivery. But, if you do have overlap, then for each overlap, check the subscribers 'recent-ids' attribute for the current message's attribute, if it doesn't exist, append it, and send the message out. If it does exist, delete the recipient from the list passed to the MTA. Seems simple, though I'm sure I've glossed over a billion and one things. --- Footnotes [1] This can probable be fixed by making sure that you break the link manually rather than depending on garbage collection. Or maybe weak lists? When you delete a list, scan the subscribers, looking for reverse links, and break them, then you delete the list. Same thing for the deletion of a subscriber. -- | Christopher Petrilli | petrilli(a)amber.org

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Forward e-mail fix needed
by Robert OConnor 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

Hi mailmen, I am subscribed to the zope.org list and when I subscribed, I could not use my forwarded email address from my domain bob(a)rocnet.com Instead, I had to use my ISP address rocon(a)pivot.net. When I used the forwarded address, I was subscribed and confirmed but never see my posts on the list come back as a post. Thank you. -bobo connor

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Big lists
by Balazs Nagy 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

Hiyas, How can I (we) set up mailman to handle big (with 25k or more subscribers) lists? I mean it would be nice if Mailman sent some mail to a distribution server which sent the same letter to a subset of subscribers. It can lower heavily the outgoing traffic. Regards: Balazs -- #!/usr/bin/perl -export-a-crypto-system-sig -http://dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

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thousands of subscribers
by Jose Carlos Benfati 28 Jan '99

28 Jan '99

Hello, I'm considering installing mailman to serve some very big lists. The biggest has more than 25000 members. Is there any restriction in mailman (like hardcoded values) that could cause me problems? Do you recommend mailman for that? thanks a lot. Jose Carlos Benfati ZZP Consultoria http://zzp.com.br

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(Maybe) wrong permissions on archives/private/listname/database
by Harald Meland 28 Jan '99

28 Jan '99

First of all: This problem could be occuring because I have messed things up by not being consistent in the way I upgrade Mailman. I have, from time to time, run "make install" and "make update" as root, mailman or myself. Yeah, I'm not the most organized person in the world, I know. :) Anyway: My Mailman is configured like this: ./configure --prefix=/local/Mailman --without-gcc \ --with-python=/local/bin/python --with-cgi-gid=nobody \ --with-mail-gid=mailman My MTA pipes all the mailman stuff into /local/Mailman/mail/wrapper, running as the user "mailman" (which has default group "mailman"). For some of my lists, I have this situation: $ ls -l archives/private/LISTNAME/ total 20 drwxrwsr-x 2 nobody mailman 512 Dec 1 16:51 1998-December -rw-rw-r-- 1 nobody mailman 939 Dec 1 16:51 1998-December.txt drwxrwsrwx 2 nobody mailman 512 Nov 13 18:26 1998-November -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody mailman 2663 Nov 23 15:32 1998-November.txt drwxrwsrwx 2 nobody mailman 512 Oct 29 15:18 1998-October -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody mailman 2898 Oct 29 15:18 1998-October.txt drwxrwsr-x 2 nobody mailman 512 Jan 19 14:03 1999-January -rw-rw-r-- 1 nobody mailman 2573 Jan 19 14:03 1999-January.txt drwx--S--- 2 nobody mailman 2048 Jan 19 14:03 database -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody mailman 2246 Jan 19 14:03 index.html -rw-rw-rw- 1 nobody mailman 555 Jan 19 14:03 pipermail.pck Are the permissions/owner on the "database" directory good? Why are some of the files world writable? For some other lists, which seem to have set very similar archival options to the list above, the owner of the "database" directory are: drwx--S--- 2 mailman mailman 1536 Jan 26 14:41 database or drwxrws--- 2 nobody mailman 1536 Jan 20 00:07 database I suppose pipermail is running as user/group "mailman" when it does it's job, and that pipermail not getting access to the "database" directory is a bad thing, right? Whenever I run "make update" as non-root, I get some warnings of the type: /local/gnu/bin/install: /local/Mailman/Mailman/pythonlib/getpass.py: Permission denied Compiling /local/Mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py ... Sorry: IOError: (13, 'Permission denied') (which I now have fixed by chowning the necessary files/directories), and then some like this: Listing /local/Mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME/database ... Can't list /local/Mailman/archives/private/LISTNAME/database (which I'm not sure how to, or even *if*I*should*, fix). So, should "make update" scream louder/suggest manual interaction when it discovers anomalies like this? Should there (somewhere) be a warning about not varying what user you run "make install" and "make update" as? And shouldn't "make update" (or something) revoke those scary world writable permission bits? -- Harald

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Localization, a proposal...
by David Li 27 Jan '99

27 Jan '99

I have a couple suggestions for supporting localization. 1. Add locale setting for mailing list. 2. In the template library, add support for locale in terms of directory. Thus, the default files for locale C will be under templates/C and for locale zh_TW.Big5 will be under templates/zh_TW.Big5. 3. Add support for locale in the in the 'maketext' method of Mailman/Utils.py, add the search capacity so it search the file first in the lists/mailinglist, then templates/LOCALE and then templates/C.

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Localization?
by David Li 27 Jan '99

27 Jan '99

Hi, I recently discover mailman and it has been a great tool. However, because of the user of my mailing lists are mainly Chinese, I need to localize all message. Is there build-in support for locatilization in mailman? If not, is there a plan to develop one? The lack of localization makes it painful to track the prograss of mailman. Thanks. David Li david(a)topware.com.tw

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Archiving using news gateway
by J C Lawrence 26 Jan '99

26 Jan '99

On Sun, 24 Jan 1999 12:49:28 +0100 Tomas Fasth<tomas(a)euronetics.se> wrote: > In "Re: [Mailman-Developers] commercial maillist system, lyris, > looks rather similar" Ken Manheimer wrote: >> It has some nice stuff that mailman doesn't - one interesting >> idea seems to be to use a news server for the archives. That >> way, archive browsers can use a news interface, or use a web >> browser to a news/web gateway. > Interesting approach. That is surely a possible workaround for the > current lack of MIME support in pipermail archiving. As a matter > of fact, I like the idea so much that I will give it a try. It has a problem: lack of good search facilities. HTML or database based list archives allow useful/intelligent search engines to be used to process them. eg I have roughly 40,000 messages up and HTML-iesed via MHonArc and indexed via WebGlimpse. Its an utter bitch to find anything without WebGlimpse. > So I guess the archive-through-news approach will work in most > cases. > Comments? Its a good option. Mostly I just want an MH-style folder for each quarter's (I operate on quarter's worth of messages, not months). -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] commercial maillist system, lyris, looks rather similar
by J C Lawrence 26 Jan '99

26 Jan '99

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 12:59:12 -0500 (EST) Ken Manheimer<ken(a)digicool.com> wrote: > Wish i had more time to investigate, if anyone does, please report > back... One thing they do have that I really like: You can place members on moderator detention. There are two flavours: 1) Have the next XXX posts from that user require moderator approval. Once they get XXX approvals then they are able to post freely. 2) Ditto to #1, but bounded by time, not count. One thing I really dislike: By default they rewrite the MessageID's on all outbound messages to give a unique MessageID per subscriber. This of course breaks reference threading, dupe checking, etc. This can (finally, it took a very long time) be turned off, but it is on by default and admin interface text is phrased to discourage turning it off. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] commercial maillist system, lyris, looks rather similar
by J C Lawrence 26 Jan '99

26 Jan '99

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 12:59:12 -0500 (EST) Ken Manheimer<ken(a)digicool.com> wrote: > I just heard mention of a commercial mailling list manager, lyris, > that upon a tiny bit of investigation looks similar in some ways > to mailman - eg, the admin interface layout: Aye, and a very brag happy set of PR staff that rather got my dander up. > (listinfo?), the orientation on web interfaces, "automatic error > handling" (bounce handling), built-in archives, built-in mail > engine (for "blinding speed"), etc. From poking around a little, > it looks like they use perl at least as an extension language - i > wonder how it's built. Monolithic on top of an DBC-accessable database (C++ strongly rumoured), runs its own SMTP server/MTA, all archive/message access is via dynamic database queries, etc. > I'm pretty curious how long it's been around - they claim that: At least 4 years, probably more. > "Lyris was the first email list server to offer a web > interface for list administrators and members." Utter codswhallop, but there's nobody with money to argue. > No more "get me off this list!" messages. > on the lyris "about" page (http://www.lyris.com/about.html), , > framed as "failsafe unsubscribing" - i think i saw this phrase in > a recent mailman-users posting, i would not be surprised if the > poster saw it there...) They do this by posting a per-user unsubscribe address on EVERY message (single message with optional unique MessageID per message) sent to each subscriber. Thus, for isntance, every message you get from a Lyris based list will have a trailer ala: To unsuscribe from this list send a message to listname-unsubscribe-817689161263@domain with the above text having a unique and different address (seemingly random string of digits hashed from your subscription ID) for everybody who receives the posting (yup, no RCPT TO bundling). As a member you then just email that address to unsubscribe. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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