Mailman 3 September 2000 - Mailman-Developers

Building a boucing detector
by Paulo Eduardo Neves Sept. 21, 2000

Sept. 21, 2000

Hi, In my site, I send a lot of emails to users. I'd like to build a software to detect bouncing email, and automatically take some actions, like removing the user from the database. I'm considering using mailman code to do it. Why build, if you can steal?:-) I have two options: 1. Do a hack, copying and pasting some of mailman code to do it. 2. Build some auxiliary classes around mailman code so other people can also use it. Sure, I prefer number 2. It also has the technical advantage that I can incorporate mailman improvements in bounce detection. I'm writing to hear some opinions about it. Is it feasible? After a quick look in the code, here is my approach. I would like very much to hear people more knowledgeable about Mailman code criticize it. There's two spots that handle bouncing email. The files in directory Bouncers/ identify if a message is a bounce. Calling BounceAPI.py with a message instance and a list instance calls the RegisterBounce method in list if the email is a bounce. Bouncer.py is the mix-in class that handle the bounces and calls some methods of its sibiling and subclasses (e.g. IsMember and Save). I'd put a pipe in the alias file to pass it to a simple program that builds the message object, the list object and pass them to BounceAPI. Subclass Bouncer class in Bouncer.py to redefine list objects methods that would be defined in other classes. Some would be dummy methods, others do the real action. Any opinions? Is there any trap? thanks in advance, -- Paulo Eduardo Neves maito:neves@samba-choro.com.br

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NULL characters in e-mail.
by Chuq Von Rospach Sept. 21, 2000

Sept. 21, 2000

Here's a fun one that I think Mailman ought to worry about. I've started getting reports of truncated digests coming out of my site. It always seemed to truncate after a specific user's posting in the digest. When I went looking, it turns out that user had a signature that happened to have a NULL (ascii 0) character at the end -- and that causes some mail clients (Netscape for one) to think it's hit EOF and it stops reading the message. This has a couple of implications for Mailman: it hoses digests, which is a big problem. And it would cause all mailman footers on individual messages to be missing. I'll bet (but haven't looked yet) that it casues problems in the archives, too. Because of this, I think Mailman needs to be sensitive to NULL characters and strip them from messages during processing. If they exist in a message, they need to be deleted. chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'"

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] NULL characters in e-mail.
by Dan Mick Sept. 21, 2000

Sept. 21, 2000

> At 4:43 PM -0700 9/20/00, Dan Mick wrote: > >Just out of curiosity, why is this not the MTA's job? > >(actually I'm really surprised it made it through the MTA unscathed) > > > >I suppose maybe the RFC says something about it...hmm... > > the MTA probably has to be transparent here. I can't think of > anything in the RFCs that'd cover it, so I wouldn't depend on it. > More importantly, since the MTAs clearly don't do anything about > this, the MLM can't simply say "not my problem" and wait for all of > the MTAs to get "fixed". But I could make the same argument about MLMs (of which there are more than one) or MUAs (same). The question of "whose responsibility is it" is a useful one. For instance, if indeed it was the MTA's violation, maybe it's only this one MTA, or one revision of the MTA, that had the bug. So fixing MLMs would be the wrong thing to do. Maybe you know something more about the set of MTAs involved than I do, since you say "the MTAs cleaerly don't do anything".

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] NULL characters in e-mail.
by Dan Mick Sept. 20, 2000

Sept. 20, 2000

Just out of curiosity, why is this not the MTA's job? (actually I'm really surprised it made it through the MTA unscathed) I suppose maybe the RFC says something about it...hmm... > Here's a fun one that I think Mailman ought to worry about. > > I've started getting reports of truncated digests coming out of my > site. It always seemed to truncate after a specific user's posting in > the digest. > > When I went looking, it turns out that user had a signature that > happened to have a NULL (ascii 0) character at the end -- and that > causes some mail clients (Netscape for one) to think it's hit EOF and > it stops reading the message. > > This has a couple of implications for Mailman: it hoses digests, > which is a big problem. And it would cause all mailman footers on > individual messages to be missing. I'll bet (but haven't looked yet) > that it casues problems in the archives, too. > > Because of this, I think Mailman needs to be sensitive to NULL > characters and strip them from messages during processing. If they > exist in a message, they need to be deleted. > > chuq > -- > Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com) > Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com) > > And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar > and say 'Man, what are you doing here?'" > > _______________________________________________ > Mailman-Developers mailing list > Mailman-Developers(a)python.org > http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers

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Syncing passwords over mailinglists
by Gerhard den Hollander Sept. 19, 2000

Sept. 19, 2000

> Apologies is this is a duplicate , > I didn't receive a confirmation that this one made it to the list > (and yes, I did turn the confirmation on ;) ) > Situation: > I maintain (with mailman) a number (20-ish going to be 100-ish) > mailinglists for our internal users. > When I create a new mailinglist I usually add a number of users > This means that these users get yet another default mailman passwd. > What I want is to synchronise all user:passwd combinations over all the > lists. > e.g. currently I have > List 1 (user:passwd) > A:asdf > B:sdfg > C:dfgh > List 2 > A:erty > C:rtyu > D:ytur > List 3 > A:lkjh > D:moiu > What I want is someway to get this to be > List 1 (user:passwd) > A:asdf > B:sdfg > C:dfgh > List 2 > A:asdf > C:dfgh > D:ytur > List 3 > A:asdf > D:ytur > > Unfortunately I have 0 experience in programming python. > I looked through the clone_member program in the bin directory and it > looks like what I want is indeed possible provided I know enough python. > If some kind soul could give me 2 scripts > 1 : that lists (given a mailinglist) all users and passwords > and > 2 : that given a mailinglist, and a list of username/passwords > sets the password for the listed user to be the one listed in that > file. > than I would already be fuly helped. > Of course, ideally someone else has already bumped into this problem and > solved it the python way, in which case I'd be very grateful for this > program. > Thanks in advance > (and I guess this goes whitout saying on this list, > but apart from the above, Im pretty impressed with mailman) Kind regards, -- Gerhard den Hollander Phone +31-10.280.1515 Technical Support Jason Geosystems BV Fax +31-10.280.1511 (When calling please note: we are in GMT+1) gdenhollander(a)jasongeo.com POBox 1573 visit us at http://www.jasongeo.com 3000 BN Rotterdam "TeamWare" for finding Oil & Gas...The Smart Way The Netherlands This e-mail and any attachment is/are intended solely for the named addressee(s) and may contain information that is confidential and privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, we request that you do not disseminate, forward, distribute or copy this e-mail message. If you have received this e-mail message in error, please notify us immediately by telephone and destroy the original message.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Re: Editing the posting
by Gerhard den Hollander Sept. 18, 2000

Sept. 18, 2000

Apologies is this is a duplicate , I didn't receive a confirmation that this one made it to the list (and yes, I did turn the confirmation on ;) ) Situation: I maintain (with mailman) a number (20-ish going to be 100-ish) mailinglists for our internal users. When I create a new mailinglist I usually add a number of users This means that these users get yet another default mailman passwd. What I want is to synchronise all user:passwd combinations over all the lists. e.g. currently I have List 1 (user:passwd) A:asdf B:sdfg C:dfgh List 2 A:erty C:rtyu D:ytur List 3 A:lkjh D:moiu What I want is someway to get this to be List 1 (user:passwd) A:asdf B:sdfg C:dfgh List 2 A:asdf C:dfgh D:ytur List 3 A:asdf D:ytur Unfortunately I have 0 experience in programming python. I looked through the clone_member program in the bin directory and it looks like what I want is indeed possible provided I know enough python. If some kind soul could give me 2 scripts 1 : that lists (given a mailinglist) all users and passwords and 2 : that given a mailinglist, and a list of username/passwords sets the password for the listed user to be the one listed in that file. than I would already be fuly helped. Of course, ideally someone else has already bumped into this problem and solved it the python way, in which case I'd be very grateful for this program. Thanks in advance (and I guess this goes whitout saying on this list, but apart from the above, Im pretty impressed with mailman) Kind regards, -- Gerhard den Hollander Phone +31-10.280.1515 Technical Support Jason Geosystems BV Fax +31-10.280.1511 (When calling please note: we are in GMT+1) gdenhollander(a)jasongeo.com POBox 1573 visit us at http://www.jasongeo.com 3000 BN Rotterdam "TeamWare" for finding Oil & Gas...The Smart Way The Netherlands This e-mail and any attachment is/are intended solely for the named addressee(s) and may contain information that is confidential and privileged. If you are not the intended recipient, we request that you do not disseminate, forward, distribute or copy this e-mail message. If you have received this e-mail message in error, please notify us immediately by telephone and destroy the original message.

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multi-lingual mailing lists
by Aidan Cully Sept. 18, 2000

Sept. 18, 2000

Forgive me for taking a while to get to the point... I feel the need to give some background. For the impatient, scroll down to the block labeled 'THE POINT'. On the Gnome development list, there's been some discussion, lately, about allowing the non-English speaking world to communicate in their native tongues on the list. There's probably some English chauvinism in my attitude, but I don't like the idea of having people send messages in non-English languages to an English list... It seems to me that the project is global enough that if people start communicating in non-"standard" languages, without necessarily providing a mechanism for allowing people that don't speak the language to filter out those messages, the signal/noise can get pretty bad. At the same time, I agree with the need for people to be able to participate in a large community, without necessarily needing to speak English. By having one-language mailing lists, a large percentage of the community might be excluded from the discussion. Right now, almost all discussions take place in English, and if a French list were to fork off, I suspect that, even though a good chunk of Aussies, Brits, Americans, &c. probably speak French, they would still just subscribe to the English list, and the French list would be nigh useless. THE POINT: I think it would be a good idea for mailing-list software to manage multiple language support. The mechanism I'm imagining involves setting up a bunch of '<listname>-<language>@<product>.org' submission addresses for the same list. The list server would then use a per-user preference setting to decide which members of the list want to receive mail in the message's language. The message is then sent out using that <listname>, and the Reply-To: header is set to <listname>-<language>@<product>.org. Maybe also have an X-Language: header, automatically inserted by the list server. By default, subscribe people to all languages. Does this make sense? Or sound like a good idea? Please CC: me in all replies, as I'm not a subscriber. --aidan

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RE: approve and add user
by Tom Neff Sept. 17, 2000

Sept. 17, 2000

Christopher Kolar <ckolar(a)admin.aurora.edu> wrote: > Yes, I know this is late. I had some non-member postings this morning on > one of my lists and it occurred to me that it would be nice if there were > an additional action available: "approve and add user" -- though > I have not > figured out if it would be better to add the user as a subscriber > or to add > the user to the implicit approval list. It would be best to have the option of which kind of add to do when you do it. Actually I am not a fan of adding "users" for these aliases, nor of adding them to an independent "flat" approval list, because (a) all they are is aliases, which shouldn't be allocated the same resources as a real user, and (b) when the user really does disappear, the aliases ought to go with them. The best solution would be to associate an array of aliases and/or alias regexps WITH a real user. (a) The user could be given some friendly-formatted checkboxes and/or text fields on their profile to indicate other places or known addresses that they post from, but just as importantly, (b) when an admin sees a non-member message, she or he could [i] search for a matching user and [ii] opt to associate the new address with that user as an exact alias, or as a "smart" regexp. So let's say a non-member message arrives from tom_neff(a)mail3.grassyhill.org Mailman could, at the admin's request, do a "smart search" and pop up a selection list saying * ADD A MEMBER ALIAS * We found these possible member matches: ( ) tom_neff(a)dismal.com ( ) tneff(a)grassyhill.org ( ) edjones(a)grassyhill.org Select one or enter another member: ________________ This new alias for the selected member will be: ( ) An exact match: tom_neff(a)mail3.grassyhill.org ( ) A "smart host" match: tom_neff(a)(.+\.)?grassyhill.org Or enter your own match expression: ____________________ [ADD ALIAS] [RESET] [CANCEL] If you took this approach, managing peripatetic members and capricious institutional postmasters would be a snap.

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last min sugg: admin add user option
by Christopher Kolar Sept. 17, 2000

Sept. 17, 2000

Yes, I know this is late. I had some non-member postings this morning on one of my lists and it occurred to me that it would be nice if there were an additional action available: "approve and add user" -- though I have not figured out if it would be better to add the user as a subscriber or to add the user to the implicit approval list. Most of the lists that I run are in a university, where people are often posting from other than their "official" address that is part of a list. It would be helpful here anyway. Just a thought, --chris

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] some more futures on mailman...
by Sean Reifschneider Sept. 16, 2000

Sept. 16, 2000

On Thu, Sep 14, 2000 at 12:13:02PM -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote: >Yah. That one gets really interesting, really fast. There are all >sorts of wrinkles here, because even with sendmail, you start having >to tweak all sorts of files and keep them in coordination, and that I think that's beyond the scope of Mailman... Besides, if your MTA doesn't do these things well, you haven't really lost anything, you're just back where you are now (except maybe you want to upgrade to a bit more modern of an MTA ;-). I'm sure that other MTAs handle it well, but I know that QMail does. Basicly, e-mail for "list(a)lists.domain.com" on my box gets forwarded the local user "mailman-lists.domain.com-list". I have a "default" processing program set up for the mailman user which strips out the domain name and destination, and sends it to the correct program with the correct arguments. At the moment it simply ignores the domain portion. >ignores the database backend details within mailman -- and how do you >resolve issues where the vhosting fails (for instance, not all web Again, I think that's beyond the scope of what we expect Mailman to handle. Garbage in, garbage out... If the web server doesn't pass the URL to the CGI, or uses an unknown domain, I'd expect mailman to treat it as if it does now -- listing all domains/lists for the admin page, and none on the listinfo page if the "show only this domain" option is set... >If you are on such a host, how do you get to the right pages if they >overload on top of each other in the namespace? ugh. Are you talking about if they're using name-based virtual hosting, or ??? If you are running Mailman under a broken web server, I wouldn't expect Mailman to do anything meaningful. ;-) Crippling people who ARE using functional web servers (I mean, Apache is well over half the "market", right?) just because somone might have a broken server doesn't help anyone... I don't see my changes as HINDERING people who use broken servers, they just couldn't do the extra domain-based functionality. They'd probably HAVE to set it so that all domains lists were shown on listinfo and the like. >At some point, you almost have ot start running multiple instances of Why? There's a difference between installing multiple binaries, and having a single set of binaries being able to access multiple sets of data. The latter is not evil. ;-) >mailman. You take the basic problem of trying to have >"chuqui(a)plaidworks.com" and "chuqui(a)chuqui.com" going to different >people on the same machine -- and throw gasoline on the problem. As I said, with QMail at least it's not really an issue. The mail goes to "mailman-plaidworks.com-chuqui" and "mailman-chuqui.com-chuqui", which my delivery program would then be able to handle to the list processing program with the arguments "plaidworks.com" and "chuqui". In sendmail you'd have to do more work to set up the individual accounts, but it shoudl be doable there as well: chuqui(a)plaidworks.com: |/home/mailman/bin/whatever chuqui plaidworks.com >Me -- I handle it by not allowing it. I *could* figure out a way, but >it just plain old isn't worth the hassle. Maybe not to you, but IMHO there is good reason to have it in Mailman. I don't run into it being a problem right now, but as I add more domains it's likely to be. As we're hosting the lists for free as a community service, nobody is likely to complain, but it's still worth doing IMHO. >What we're talking about (and need) instead is a hierarchic >inheritance system. you send off a request for "the unsubscribe >message", and mailman goes off and finds it. Starting at the most >specific place in the hierarchy and working down to distribution >definitions, it returns the first one it finds. Yeah, like a search path. ;-) Why are you mapping the concept "searching a list of locations" onto the OOP domain? >The hierarchy would look something like: >user->list->host->site->distribution. And the trick is to define each >object (like 'unsubscribe message') in terms of other objects, and >customize each object at whatever level in the hierarchy is >appropriate. That way, list-specific stuff lives iwth the list, not >the host. and the two can be changed independently, or list stuff can >override host stuff. How are you defining the objects based on other objects? Are you saying that the host "unsub message" would be a concatenation of the distribution and site messages? >defining what objects you need and what the hierarchy is, and also >who the owner is -- because there are going to objects that CAN'T be >overridden higher in the hierarchy, or that an site-owner will want >to tie down and not let a host owner or list owner override. Presumably, if you read a "list unsub message" it may search back up the heirarchy searching for that message, but if you write it it would write directly to the list context, not search upwards. Sean -- [...] who asked "Why do we do it, this science?" No one had an answer until I stood up and said "Isn't there money in a Nobel?" -- Steve Martin Sean Reifschneider, Inimitably Superfluous <jafo(a)tummy.com> tummy.com - Linux Consulting since 1995. Qmail, KRUD, Firewalls, Python

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