Mailman 3 November 2001 - Mailman-Developers

Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman password and administrative reminders
by Dan Mick Aug. 14, 2003

Aug. 14, 2003

? This very message came to me with the following header: Errors-To: mailman-developers-admin(a)python.org All my bounces come to the list admin address, set in the admin webpage, in the second field of General Options. Do you have that set to something, and bounces still come to root? > 2. Bounces are sent to the poor postmaster instead of a -admin address. > I'm not entirely certain, but I think an Errors-To: header or something > like that in all Mailman messages might allow one to distribute that load > somewhat.

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[ANNOUNCE] Mailman 2.1 alpha 2
by barry＠digicool.com March 25, 2002

March 25, 2002

This the official announcement for Mailman 2.1 alpha 2. Because it's an alpha, this announcement is only going out to the mailman-* mailing lists. I'll make two warnings: you probably should still not use this version for production systems (but TIA for any and all testing you do with it!), and I've already had a couple of bug fixes from early adopters. 2.1a2 should still be useful, but you might want to keep an eye on cvs and the mailman-checkins list for updates. I am only making the tarball available on SourceForge, so you'll need to go to http://sf.net/projects/mailman to grab it. You'll also need to upgrade to mimelib-0.4, so be sure to go to http://sf.net/projects/mimelib to grab and install that tarball first. To view the on-line documentation, see http://www.list.org/MM21/index.html or http://mailman.sf.net/MM21/index.html Below is an excerpt from the NEWS file for all the changes since 2.1alpha1. There are a bunch of new features coming down the pike, and I hope to have an alpha3 out soon. I'm also planning on doing much more stress testing of this version with real list traffic, and I'm hoping we'll start to get more languages integrated into cvs. Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.1 alpha 2 (11-Jul-2001) - Building o mimelib 0.4 is now required. Get it from http://mimelib.sf.net. If you've installed an earlier version of mimelib, you must upgrade. o /usr/local/mailman is now the default installation directory. Use configure's --prefix switch to change it back to the default (/home/mailman) or any other installation directory of your choice. - Security o Better definition of authentication domains. The following roles have been defined: user, list-admin, list-moderator, creator, site-admin. o There is now a separate role of "list moderator", which has access to the pending requests (admindb) page, but not the list configuration pages. o Subscription confirmations can now be performed via email or via URL. When a subscription is received, a unique (sha) confirm URL is generated in the confirmation message. Simply visiting this URL completes the subscription process. o In a similar manner, removal requests (via web or email command) no longer require the password. If the correct password is given, the removal is performed immediately. If no password is given, then a confirmation message is generated. - Internationalization o More I18N patches. The basic infrastructure should now be working correctly. Spanish templates and catalogs are included, and English, French, Hungarian, and Big5 templates are included. o Cascading specializations and internationalization of templates. Templates are now search for in the following order: list-specific location, domain-specific location, site-wide location, global defaults. Each search location is further qualified by the language being displayed. This means that you only need to change the templates that are different from the global defaults. Templates renamed: admlogin.txt => admlogin.html Templates added: private.html - Web UI o Redesigned the user options page. It now sits behind an authentication so user options cannot be viewed without the proper password. The other advantage is that the user's password need not be entered on the options page to unsubscribe or change option values. The login screen also provides for password mail-back, and unsubscription w/ confirmation. Other new features accessible from the user options page include: ability to change email address (with confirmation) both per-list and globally for all list on virtual domain; global membership password changing; global mail delivery disable/enable; ability to suppress password reminders both per-list and globally; logout button. [Note: the handle_opts cgi has gone away] o Color schemes for non-template based web pages can be defined via mm_cfg. o Redesign of the membership management page. The page is now split into three subcategories (Membership List, Mass Subscription, and Mass Removal). The Membership List subcategory now supports searching for member addresses by regular expression, and if necessary, it groups member addresses first alphabetically, and then by chunks. Mass Subscription and Mass Removal now support file upload, with one address per line. o Hyperlinks from the logos in the footers have been removed. The sponsors got too much "unsubscribe me!" spam from desperate user of Mailman at other sites. o New buttons on the digest admin page to send a digest immediately (if it's non-empty), to start a new digest volume with the next digest, and to select the interval with which to automatically start a new digest volume (yearly, monthly, quarterly, weekly, daily). DEFAULT_DIGEST_VOLUME_FREQUENCY is a new configuration variable, initially set to give a new digest volume monthly. o Through-the-web list creation and removal, using a separate site-wide authentication role called the "list creator and destroyer" or simply "list creator". If the configuration variable OWNERS_CAN_DELETE_THEIR_OWN_LISTS is set to 1 (by default, it's 0), then list admins can delete their own lists. This feature requires an adaptor for the particular MTA you're using. An adaptor for Postfix is included, as is a dumb adaptor that just emails mailman@yoursite with the necessary Sendmail style /etc/alias file changes. Some MTAs like Exim can be configured to automatically recognize new lists. The adaptor is selected via the MTA option in mm_cfg.py - Email UI o In email commands, "join" is a synonym for "subscribe". "remove" and "leave" are synonyms for "unsubscribe". New robot addresses are support to make subscribing and unsubscribing much easier: mylist-join@mysite mylist-leave@mysite o Confirmation messages have a shortened Subject: header, containing just the word "confirm" and the confirmation cookie. This should help for MUAs that like to wrap long Subject: lines, messing up confirmation. o Mailman now recognizes an Urgent: header, which, if it contains the list moderator or list administrator password, forces the message to be delivered immediately to all members (i.e. both regular and digest members). The message is also placed in the digest. If the password is incorrect, the message will be bounced back to the sender. - Performance o Refinements to the new qrunner subsystem which preserves FIFO order of messages. o The qrunner is no longer started from cron. It is started by a Un*x init-style script called bin/mailmanctl (see below). cron/qrunner has been removed. - Command line scripts o bin/mailmanctl script added, which is used to start, stop, and restart the qrunner daemon. o bin/qrunner script added which allows a single sub-qrunner to run once through its processing loop. o bin/change_pw script added (eases mass changing of list passwords). o bin/update grows a -f switch to force an update. o bin/newlang renamed to bin/addlang; bin/rmlang removed. o bin/mmsitepass has grown a -c option to set the list creator's password. The site-wide `create' web page is linked to from the admin overview page. o bin/newlist's -o option is removed. This script also grows a way of spelling the creation of a list in a specific virtual domain. o The `auto' script has been removed. o bin/dumpdb has grown -m/--marshal and -p/--pickle options. o bin/list_admins can be used to print the owners of a mailing list. o bin/genaliases regenerates from scratch the aliases and aliases.db file for the Postfix MTA. - Archiver o New archiver date clobbering option, which allows dates to only be clobber if they are outrageously out-of-date (default setting is 15 days on either side of received timestamp). New configuration variables: ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW The archived copy of messages grows an X-List-Received-Date: header indicating the time the message was received by Mailman. o PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL configuration variable is removed (this can be calculated on the fly, and removing it actually makes site configuration easier). - Miscellaneous o Several new README's have been added. o Most syslog entries for the qrunner have been redirected to logs/error. o On SIGHUP, qrunner will re-open all its log files and restart all child processes. See "bin/mailmanctl restart". - Patches and bug fixes o SF patches and bug fixes applied: 420396, 424389, 227694, 426002, 401372 (partial), 401452. o Fixes in 2.0.5 ported forward: Fix a lock stagnation problem that can result when the user hits the `stop' button on their browser during a write operation that can take a long time (e.g. hitting the membership management admin page). o Fixes in 2.0.4 ported forward: Python 2.1 compatibility release. There were a few questionable constructs and uses of deprecated modules that caused annoying warnings when used with Python 2.1. This release quiets those warnings. o Fixes in 2.0.3 ported forward: Bug fix release. There was a small typo in 2.0.2 in ListAdmin.py for approving an already subscribed member (thanks Thomas!). Also, an update to the OpenWall security workaround (contrib/securelinux_fix.py) was included. Thanks to Marc Merlin.

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[RELEASED] Mailman 2.1 alpha 3
by barry＠zope.com Jan. 1, 2002

Jan. 1, 2002

I've finally decided to put a fork in it and release the third, and hopefully last alpha in the Mailman 2.1 series. If you want to see a description of all the new stuff, please see http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=58074 There's quite a lot there! Everything should be up on SourceForge now, with updates to www.list.org hopefully tomorrow some time. See also http://mailman.sf.net/MM21/ for updated pages about Mailman 2.1. Note that you no longer need to install the mimelib package. This has been replaced by the email package, which comes with Python 2.2b1, or for Python 2.1.1 or 2.0.1, you'll need to install email-0.93 which is available in the misc/ directory. See the INSTALL file for details. Below is an excerpt from the NEWS file for all the changes since 2.1 alpha 2. I'm hoping that this will be the last alpha release. That means there's one more release in which we have an opportunity for new features, so I suggest that you grab 2.1a3 and give it a good workout (in a non-production environment <wink>). If there are glaring things missing, as always, let me know. Please, all discussion about 2.1 alpha should be conducted on the mailman-developers(a)python.org mailing list. I will be creating some test lists on python.org an you'll be able to subscribe to them to try things out. I'd like to have a short cycle for alpha3->beta1, with bug fixes only once beta1 comes out. Language translators: I've updated the langpack on SourceForge with the latest catalogs and templates. I've also uploaded the latest README-I18N.en file if you'd like to contribute new languages. If you've been holding off contributing new language files, please consider finishing them off so that I can integrate them in time for beta1. Enjoy, -Barry -------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.1 alpha 3 (22-Oct-2001) - Realname support o Mailman now tracks a member's Real Name in addition to their email address. o List members can now supply their Real Names when subscribing via the web. Their Real Names are parsed from any thru-email subscriptions. o Members can change their Real Names on their options page, and admins can change members' Real Names on the membership pages. Mass subscribing accepts "email(a)dom.ain (Real Name)" entries, for both in-text-box and file-upload mass subscriptions. - Filtering and Privacy o Reply-To: munging has been enhanced to allow a wider range of list policies. You can now pre-strip any Reply-To: headers before adding list-specific ones (i.e. you can override or extend existing Reply-To: headers). If stripping, the old headers are no longer saved on X-Reply-To: o New sender moderation rules. The old `posters', `member_only_posting', `moderated' and `forbidden_posters' options have been removed in favor of a new moderation scheme. Each member has a personal moderation bit, and non-member postings can be automatically accepted, held for approval, rejected (bounced) or discarded. o When membership rosters are private, responses to subscription (and other) requests are made more generic so that these processes can't be covertly mined for hidden addresses. If a subscription request comes in for a user who is already subscribed, the user is notified of potential membership mining. o When a held message is approved via the admindb page, an X-Moderated: header is added to the message. o List admins can now set an unsubscribe policy which requires them to approve of member unsubscriptions. - Web U/I o All web confirmations now require a two-click procedure, where the first click gives them a page that allows them to confirm or cancel their subscription. It is bad form for an email click (HTTP GET) to have side effects. o Lots of improvements for clarity. o The Privacy category has grown three subcategories. o The General options page as a number of subsection headers. o The Passwords and Languages categories are now on separate admin pages. o The admin subcategories are now formated as two columns in the top and bottom legends. o When creating a list through the web, you can now specify the initial list of supported languages. o The U/I for unsubscribing a member on the admin's membership page should be more intuitive now. o There is now a separate configuration option for whether the goodbye_msg is sent when a member is unsubscribed. - Performance o misc/mailman is a Unix init script, appropriate for /etc/init.d, and containing chkconfig hooks for systems that support it. o bin/mailmanctl has been rewritten; the `restart' command actually works now. It now also accepts -s, -q, and -u options. o bin/qrunner has been rewritten too; it can serve the role of the old cron/qrunner script for those who want classic cron-invoked mail delivery. o Internally, messages are now stored in the qfiles directory primarily as pickles. List configuration databases are now stored as pickles too (i.e. config.pck). bin/dumpdb knows how to display both pickles and marshals. - Mail delivery o If a user's message is held for approval, they are sent a notification message containing a confirmation cookie. They can use this confirmation cookie to cancel their own postings (if they haven't already been approved). o When held messages are forwarded to an explicit address using the admindb page, it is done so in a message/rfc822 encapsulation. o When a message is first held for approval, the notification sent to the list admin is a 3-part multipart/mixed. The first part holds the notification message, the second part hold the original message, and the third part hold a cookie confirmation message, to which the admin can respond to approve or discard the message via email. o In the mail->news gateway, you can define mail headers that must be modified or deleted before the message can be posted to the nntp server. o The list admin can send an immediate urgent message to the entire list membership, bypassing digest delivery. This is done by adding an Urgent: header with the list password. Urgent messages with an invalid password are rejected. o Lists can now optionally personalize email messages, if the site admin allows it. Personalized messages mean that the To: header includes the recipient's address instead of the list's address, and header and footer messages can contain user-specific information. Note that only regular deliveries can currently be personalized. o Message that come from Usenet but that have broken MIME boundaries are ignored. o If the site administrator agrees, list owners have the ability to disable RFC 2369 List-* headers. - Building/testing/configuration o mimelib is no longer required, but you must install the email package (see the tarball in the misc directory). o An (as yet) incomplete test suite has been added. Don't try running it in a production environment! o Better virtual host support by adding a mapping from the host name given in cgi's HTTP_HOST/SERVER_NAME variable to the email host used in list addresses. (E.g. www.python.org maps to @python.org). o Specifying urls to external public archivers is more flexible. o The filters/ subdirectory has been removed. o There is now a `site list' which is a mailing list that must be created first, and from which all password reminders appear to come from. It is recommended that this list be called "mailman(a)your.site". o bin/move_list is no longer necessary (see the FAQ for detailed instructions on renaming a list). o A new script bin/fix_url.py can be used with bin/withlist to change a list's web_page_url configuration variable (since it is no longer modifiable through the web). - Internationalization o Support for German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, and Norwegian have been added. - Miscellaneous o Lots of new bounce detectors. Bounce detectors can now discard temporary bounce messages by returning a special Stop value. o bin/withlist now sports a -q/--quiet flag. o bin/add_members has a new -a/--admin-notify flag which can be used to inhibit list owner notification for each subscription. - Membership Adaptors o Internally, mailing list memberships are accessed through a MemberAdaptor interface. This would allow for integrating membership databases with external sources (e.g. Zope or LDAP), although the only MemberAdaptor currently implemented is a "classic" adaptor which stores the membership information on the MailList object. o There's a new pipeline handler module called FileRecips.py which could be used to get all regular delivery mailing list recipients from a Sendmail-style :include: file (see List Extensibility bullet below). This work was sponsored by Control.com - List Extensibility o A framework has been added which can be used to specialize and extend specific mailing lists. If there is a file called lists/<yourlist>/extend.py, it is execfile()'d after the MailList object is instantiated. The file should contain a function extend() which will be called with the MailList instance. This function can do all sorts of deep things, like modify the handler pipeline just for this list, or even strip out particular admin GUI elements (see below). o All the admin page GUI elements are now separate components. This provides greater flexibility for list customization. Also, each GUI element will be given an opportunity to handle admin CGI form data. This work was sponsored by Control.com - Topic Filters o A new feature has been added called "Topic Filters". A list administrator can create topics, which are essentially regular expression matches against Subject: and Keyword: headers (including such pseudo-headers if they appear in the first few lines of the body of a message). List members can then `subscribe' to various topics, which allows them to filter out any messages that don't match a topic, or to filter out any message that does match a topic. This can be useful for high volume lists where not everyone will be interested in every message. This work was sponsored by Control.com

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"stable" release / 2.1 release status
by Matthias Klose Jan. 1, 2002

Jan. 1, 2002

Reading the web pages: MM21/index.html: Version (2.1a2, released on 11-Jul-2001) is the current stable GNU release. download.html: Version (2.0.6, released on Jul 25 2001) is the current GNU release. Correct to name 2.1a2 a stable release? Somewhere on the lists Barry Warsaw didn't give a garanty for a smooth upgrade path between the alpha releases. Or is 2.1 on the horizon, so that it's more work to change the web page ;-) Matthias

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] ADMINDB_PAGE_TEXT_LIMIT = -1 does not work
by Dan Mick Dec. 28, 2001

Dec. 28, 2001

> putting ADMINDB_PAGE_TEXT_LIMIT = -1 in mm_cfg.py to view all the > message to be approved, seems to not work properly. ...in 2.1 CVS. Yup, seems to be the case. I've filed a bug with a fix that works for me (to be made much more elegant by Barry :)

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] To be more precise on the Web errors...
by Dan Mick Dec. 15, 2001

Dec. 15, 2001

I still seem OK without that latest MailList.py patch. > Hi, > > it seems that accessing via Web the main /mailman/listinfo page I get the error > below, but if I access directly one (and only this, it seems) list > via /mailman/listinfo/listname all works fine :-) I can perform all the > administrative operations! :-) I don't know why only for this list, > anyway... > > Here is the Traceback for the lists that don't work: > > Traceback (most recent call last): > File "/home/mailman/scripts/driver", line 96, in run_main > main() > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admin.py", line 62, in main > mlist = MailList.MailList(listname, lock=0) > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 98, in __init__ > self.Load() > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 531, in Load > self.CheckVersion(dict) > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 548, in CheckVersion > self.Lock() > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 151, in Lock > self.Load() > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 531, in Load > self.CheckVersion(dict) > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 548, in CheckVersion > self.Lock() > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 147, in Lock > self.__lock.lock(timeout) > File "/home/mailman/Mailman/LockFile.py", line 268, in lock > raise AlreadyLockedError > AlreadyLockedError: > > --luca > > > _______________________________________________ > Mailman-Developers mailing list > Mailman-Developers(a)python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers

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Help
by Kadar I. Csaba Dec. 8, 2001

Dec. 8, 2001

Hi , I joined this group, because I own a mailman discussion group, and I have a question. When I added a person, I added his e-mail address followed with his name. In the membership page this user apear with e-mail address followed by his name. When I, or he would like to modify anythink in his data, the server answwer, that he aren't user. Please help me in solving this problem, because this man don't receive the messages. Thank in advance for your help, Csaba

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Bounce Options
by barry＠zope.com Dec. 6, 2001

Dec. 6, 2001

[Changing followups to mailman-developers as this discussion really belongs there. -BAW] >>>>> "DW" == Dan Wilder <dan(a)ssc.com> writes: DW> I guess I'm wondering if anybody recalls the intent of this DW> code. The only person who ever had a chance of understanding the intent is John Viega, but he's been removed from Mailman hacking for so long, I doubt even he remembers. I've looked at this stuff too, and there are a number of things that seem just plain broken to me. I'd like to rewrite it all, but I'm not sure there will be time before 2.1. -Barry

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Internal server error when accessing admin pages
by Marc MERLIN Dec. 4, 2001

Dec. 4, 2001

I've gotten several bug reports on SF for people who can't get to the admin pages The only error apache gives me is: [Thu Jul 12 15:47:17 2001] [error] [client 171.71.41.31] Premature end of script headers: /var/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admin I never had the problem myself and it seems to come and go Is there any debugging I can in mailman to at least give me some error in my apache error log? (or do you think it's an apache problem?) Attached is one of the tickets I've gotten Thanks, Marc ----- Forwarded message from noreply(a)sourceforge.net ----- To: noreply(a)sourceforge.net From: noreply(a)sourceforge.net Subject: [ alexandria-Support Requests-438992 ] Administration interface to mail lists Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 02:43:44 -0700 Support Requests item #438992, was opened at 2001-07-06 00:49 You can respond by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=200001&aid=438992&group_id… Category: Mailing Lists Group: Second Level Support >Status: Open Priority: 9 Submitted By: Richard Leyton (rleyton) Assigned to: Marc Merlin (marcmerlin) Summary: Administration interface to mail lists Initial Comment: A post to a mailing list needs admin attention (it's a moderated list). The URL: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/admindb/leap-announce results in: Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, staff(a)sourceforge.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error. More information about this error may be available in the server error log. Could you look into it. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >Comment By: Richard Leyton (rleyton) Date: 2001-07-26 02:43 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=7704 In a nutshell, this ceased to be a problem the next day, i'd forgotten about this ticket until the status changed. I had given a detailed response to your queries, but mozilla crashed on me before i clicked on the submit, and i was in a hurry, so i didn't get around to reposting it. in a nutshell: - all browsers tried (opera, netscape & mozilla) - had a URL via e-mail to attend to pending admin requests. - yes it gave the same error with netscape - it was the message received on going to the URL contained in the e-mail. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Marc Merlin (marcmerlin) Date: 2001-07-25 11:14 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=6500 We need the information if you want us to help you ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Comment By: Marc Merlin (marcmerlin) Date: 2001-07-17 08:38 Message: Logged In: YES user_id=6500 What browser? Does it fail repeatetly from different places? Does it fail with plain netscape? Does it fail when you access the page, or when you post back a form? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can respond by visiting: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=200001&aid=438992&group_id… ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Microsoft is to operating systems & security .... .... what McDonalds is to gourmet cooking Home page: http://marc.merlins.org/ | Finger marc_f(a)merlins.org for PGP key

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Subscriber names
by Greg Ward Nov. 30, 2001

Nov. 30, 2001

On 24 November 2001, marina said: > Does anybody know whether there's a way for Mailman to ask (and > remember) subscriber names, as well as their email addresses? I've just added a new entry to the FAQ Wizard: 3.2. How can I track subscriber's real names? With Mailman 2.0.x, you can't: Mailman only remembers each subscriber's email address, password, and list options. (Or visit http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.002.htp) If this is wrong or incomplete, please visit the FAQ Wizard and update it yourself. In particular, can Mailman 2.1 track real names? Greg -- Greg Ward - software developer gward(a)mems-exchange.org MEMS Exchange http://www.mems-exchange.org

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