Mailman 3 December 1999 - Mailman-Developers

8-bit input in administrator menu
by Balazs Nagy 11 Dec '99

11 Dec '99

Hi, I did a little digging about entering text with accents. It's a bit curious that one can type accents in textarea but to textbox cannot. In the latter case you can see an escaped print of your input. In the end I came to htmlformat.py's InputObj. At this point I have a humble question: who put `-s around value? After a s/`value`/value/ in line #368, almost everything works fine, because this brings up a problem about quoting. Of course, the patch is here. -- Regards: Kevin (Balazs)

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Problem with moving from /home/mailman -> /usr/mailman
by Dan A. Dickey 09 Dec '99

09 Dec '99

I was using mailman 1.0 on an "old" machine, and it was installed to /home/mailman - the default. We tried moving the lists to a new machine, but the admin wanted it based somewhere other than /home/mailman, so we chose /usr/mailman. I retrieved version 1.1, and installed it. The 'make update' failed. Basically, I believe this is because CheckVersion() thought the config.db that we brought over from the old machine was up to date, and so used it as is. I think it contains references to /home/mailman, and I do not know how to change them to /usr/mailman. For the time being, we are getting by because we have a symlink from /home/mailman -> /usr/mailman; but I want to do away with this scenario. Can one/more of the experts out there tell me how to correct the above problems? Can this be addressed in a new version of mailman a bit better? Or can someone tell me where to RTFM? I'm willing to try code here if someone wants to take a stab at fixing this. Thanks! -Dan

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bulkmailing & admin interface
by Ricardo Kustner 09 Dec '99

09 Dec '99

Hi, the MM feature list says: "Direct SMTP delivery of messages, including integrated fast bulk mailing." i guess this is build into mailman to speed up mail delivery... but when mail is send out during approving (many) held back messages through the web admin interface, i wonder if it's still effective to use this bulk mailing technique? when all messages need improval before being send out, it's no use to have mailman try his best to deliver the mail as quickly as possible anyway... I don't know much about the way MM delivers mail, but some big annoyances i've had with using MM are that when approving several messages from the admin interface : (a) the cgi process(es) takes *too* long to finnish (causing timeouts sometimes) and (b) they cause a huge load on the system. Would it be possible to be able to choose for a "relaxed" way of delevering mail in certain situations? i'd rather have the messages being delivered with a small delay then MM trying hard to be as quick as possible with delivery... hoping for at least one reaction to this email, :) Ricardo. --

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1.1 cvs problem
by Ron Jarrell 06 Dec '99

06 Dec '99

You can't build a 1.1 release from the cvs archive; at the very least the src dir wasn't tagged with the Release_1_1 tag, and thus doesn't checkout...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] I want to transfer a mail to a program
by Richard Ellerbrock 06 Dec '99

06 Dec '99

>I am writing a Script. Now what I want to do is when I send a mail to a list >member in a mailman, I want to direct the mail to a program which can be a >script or a servlet or anything that can execute on the server. The task of >this script shall be to save the received mail to a file. > >Can some one tell me how this can be done You probably want to use procmail as a front to mailman. Modify your alias file and run the message through procmail first, and then pass it to mailman. I did a similar trick to block external e-mails to mailman to prevent non-employees being able to subscribe to our internal lists. Mailman cannot do this. Here is the method: Modify /etc/aliases: www-request: "|/usr/bin/procmail -m LIST='www' /etc/mail/procmailrc.lists" This will call procmail instead of mailman. Mailman is called inside the procmail script: :0 # pass along all mail for eskom * ^From:.*eskom.co.za | /home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd $LIST :0 # reply to all mail not from eskom * !^FROM_DAEMON * !^X-Loop: owner-${LIST}(a)lists.eskom.co.za { :0 hc | (formail -r -A"Precedence: bulk" \ -A"X-Loop: owner-${LIST}(a)lists.eskom.co.za" ; \ echo "\ This is an ESKOM internal mailing list to which you may not \ subscribe. If you have any queries, contact owner-${LIST}(a)lists.eskom.co.za \ for further information.") | \ $SENDMAIL -t -f owner-${LIST}(a)lists.eskom.co.za } :0 # drop all other mail /dev/null Using this method and the procmailex manpage, you should be able to do what you want. -- Richard Ellerbrock richarde(a)eskom.co.za

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I want to transfer a mail to a program
by Randhir Shinde 04 Dec '99

04 Dec '99

I am writing a Script. Now what I want to do is when I send a mail to a list member in a mailman, I want to direct the mail to a program which can be a script or a servlet or anything that can execute on the server. The task of this script shall be to save the received mail to a file. Can some one tell me how this can be done Randhir

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LogMsg problem
by Todd Pfaff 03 Dec '99

03 Dec '99

I'm using mailman 1.1. One of our lists consistently generates the following python traceback in the mailman error log whenever a message is posted to the list. Dec 01 13:22:45 1999 post: Traceback (innermost last): post: File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/mailowner", line 45, in ? post: if not mlist.bounce_processing or not mlist.ScanMessage(msg): post: File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Bouncer.py", line 449, in ScanMessage post: self.RegisterBounce(who, msg) post: File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Bouncer.py", line 138, in RegisterBounce post: self.LogMsg("bounce", report + "exceeded limits") post: File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 834, in LogMsg post: logf.write(msg % args + '\n') post: TypeError : not enough arguments for format string I've had a look at the call to LogMsg() in MailList.py from RegisterBounce() in Bouncer.py, so I sort of where the error is happening. As far as I can tell, there must be some instances where LogMsg is being called with a "msg" argument that contains % variable substitutions that have not yet been satisfied, but with an empty or insufficient "args" tuple. So, when LogMsg calls logf.write(msg % args + '\n'), the % substitution fails. It seems that, in general, the use of LogMsg is inconsistent. In some cases, a variable length args tuple is passed to LogMsg and the string formatting is done within LogMsg, but in many other cases any string formatting is done before the call to LogMsg and LogMsg is called without an args tuple. It's entirely possible that something will call LogMsg with a "msg" argument that contains a valid % substitution string even though they did not intend for a % substitution to happen. I think this is what may be happening in my case - the RegisterBounce() function builds the "msg" string from other variable strings and one of these strings may contain a % substitution string. This msg string is then passed to LogMsg but without an args tuple to satisfy the % substitution. I'm no Python expert - I just started learning it a few weeks ago - but I'm trying to think of ways to debug this, or handle the situation more gracefully. I've been poking through the Python books I have and looking at the exception handling stuff. I've come up with the following simple idea for handling this in LogMsg(). Any opinions about whether this is a good idea, whether it will work, or whether there is a better way to approach this problem? try: logf.write(msg % args + '\n') except: logf.write(msg + '\n') -- Todd Pfaff \ Email: pfaff(a)mcmaster.ca Computing and Information Services \ Voice: (905) 525-9140 x22920 ABB 132 \ FAX: (905) 528-3773 McMaster University \ Hamilton, Ontario, Canada L8S 4M1 \

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Run_queue Process
by claw＠kanga.nu 03 Dec '99

03 Dec '99

On Thu, 02 Dec 1999 13:18:24 -0700 Kory Wheatley <wheakory(a)isu.edu> wrote: > I would like to basically know how to delete the mail queue > messages sometimes if I know there is going to be a lot of queued > mail that I don't want delivered. IIRC (can't check now) it is stored inside the config.db for the list. Removing that mail is a question of unpickling the DB and removing the approriate records. <<An area that could stand some improvement FWLIW>> -- J C Lawrence Home: claw(a)kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder(a)kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Run_queue Process
by Kory Wheatley 02 Dec '99

02 Dec '99

Where in the directory structure of mailman does queued mail get placed for the cron job "run_queue" to process if the message failed to deliver the first time or the host machine was down at the time, because there are times where I don't want these messaged to be resent. I would rather deleted them then have run_queue send them out, because I had one list that had subscribed the wrong email address for 2000 users to the list and it kept trying to resend them which caused performance problems do I need to adjust sendmail to handle a situation like this? I would like to basically know how to delete the mail queue messages sometimes if I know there is going to be a lot of queued mail that I don't want delivered. -- Kory Wheatley Office Phone 236-3874 Computing & Communication Academic Computing Analyst sr. Everything you do must point to him.

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