Mailman 3 May 2001 - Mailman-Developers

Delivering messages to scripts/post
by Jesper Jensen 02 May '01

02 May '01

We have been running Mailman on Windows for about two weeks now and most things seem to work very well. To make it run I had to make some changes - all of them minor - and most of them related to opening files ('b'). Mailmanwin (as I have named it) is probably not useful for anyone but me (and my company) right now; some things do not work at all (web interface, e-mail archive, usenet gateway, all the bin scripts) and some things are changed to make them better fit my needs. I have made an "install" script doing all the work and describing all the changes, so it's fairly easy getting started. I hope to get a webpage up with these things soon. I don't expect the mailman developers to take account of any of these changes. I fully understand and respect that this is a Linux project and would hate if cross platform issues in any way affected the future direction of Mailman. Having said that, it would be nice if no module names conflicted with modules in the standard Python distribution (mailbox) ;) On to the questions. 1. Delivering messages to scripts/post I could not find any MTA for Windows (I didn't look much, though) that was able to get the toaddr and deliver the message to scripts/post. Instead we are using L-soft LSMTP (we used L-soft LISTSERV before changing to Mailman). LSMTP is told to save all messages (complete with all envelope header information) and I have made a Python script that parses each message and calls Enqueu with the correct parameters. This works well, except that we have had a couple of mail loops because of auto-responders replying directly to the list. So my question is, what information does a MTA look for before passing the message to post? I found out that filtering out all messages with daemon and/or postmaster in the fromaddr is a good idea. Are there any other "keywords" that i should know of? 2. Empty envelope fromaddr In some messages the envelope fromaddr is empty. Is it safe to never deliver a message with an empty envelope fromaddr to a list? 3. Using the envelope fromaddr or the message fromaddr I can see that this is a Mailman setting. What are the consequences of using only the envelope fromaddr? Just for the record. L-soft LISTSERV is a great product - the most solid/stable I have ever used. We chaned to Mailman because we needed some things LISTSERV didn't have. All the best, Jesper.

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Delivering messages to scripts/post
by J C Lawrence 02 May '01

02 May '01

On Tue, 01 May 2001 00:54:39 +0200 Jesper Jensen <jj-list(a)mail.dk> wrote: > I fully understand and respect that this is a Linux project... Actually its a GNU project, which is not at all Linux specific. Mailman in its current incarnation is Unix-centric in a number of ways (which subtley different from Linux-centric), but that is mainly due to the majority of the developers (and thus the users) having Unix as their preferred (server) platform. > We chaned to Mailman because we needed some things LISTSERV didn't > have. Like what? (might as well pump up our strengths) -- J C Lawrence claw(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: 2006 archives already online!
by Darrell Fuhriman 01 May '01

01 May '01

Bill Bumgarner <bbum(a)CODEFAB.COM> writes: > This appears to be a fairly common problem; I suspect that > MailMan is using a header to set the date and some folks have > their client set to preposterous dates. See: That's why under "archival options" you'll find: "Set date in archive to when the mail is claimed to have been sent, or to the time we resend it?" If you leave it on 'when sent', you deserve the mess you'll get in your archives. Darrell

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: 2006 archives already online!
by Owen Taylor 01 May '01

01 May '01

barry(a)digicool.com (Barry A. Warsaw) writes: > >>>>> "OT" == Owen Taylor <otaylor(a)redhat.com> writes: > > OT> What I did for the gnome.org archives (using mhonarc plus > OT> custom perl) is to used the Received: header for the date. > > Ah, but which one? :) There's going to have a Received: header for > each hop that message takes. By the time your message got to me, it > had 7 Received: headers, and 3 (I think) by the time it reached > Mailman. The most recent. So you'll only get the wrong date if clobber_data would also get it wrong; people will tell you pretty quickly if your mail server has an incorrect clock. > OT> Which is, almost always, quite close to the time the person > OT> actually sent it, and assuming that your local server's time > OT> isn't screwed up (which is a much bigger problem...) does > OT> not have the 2004 problem. > > OT> And it has the advantage over clobber_date of: > > | - Not munging the mail > > True, with the disadvantage that if you use an external archiver, > it'll have to handle checking for outrageous dates. clobber_date > munges the message before it hits either archiver (Pipermail or > external). I guess I'd consider getting the date right to be the concern of the archiver, not of the system feeding to the archiver - after all, its pretty common to also want to feed a chunk of old pre-mailman archives into an archiver along with the mailman ones. > If I was smart, I'd also count as a major disadvantage the > fact that I'll have to track down all the places where the Date: > header is used in Pipermail, and I /hate/ diving in that code. ;( Yeah, there are always practical concerns ;-) > | - Not being skewed by moderation delays > > Dang, yep, but fixable. > > | - Being independent of the archiving process, so if you > | import a bunch of old mail with incorrect Date: lines > | into the archiving process you still get the 2004 > | protection. > > True, with the caveat above. > > This would be a reasonable option, however if you use the most recent > Received: header, won't you still be subject to local server clock > skew? And if you use the earliest Received: you'll be subject to the > same bogosity in the Date: header. Or do you just start parsing the > Received:'s back from the most recent and take the first sane one you > find? As mentioned above, local server clock breakage isn't really something I worry about; my concern with the clobber_date method wasn't that the local clock could be wrong, but rather, that it was discarding information from the message headers and replacing it with the current time, which, in some circumstances could be significantly different. Also, I did actually have a lot of old mail with bogus Date: fields that I was importing... Regards, Owen

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ANNOUNCE mimelib 0.3
by barry＠digicool.com 01 May '01

01 May '01

I've finally moved mimelib development to SourceForge, and uploaded version 0.3. mimelib is yet another MIME and RFC 2822 <wink> message handling library for Python. It differs from older modules and packages by providing an abstract MIME object model separate from parsing and generating the plain text representations. There is a parser class to convert from plain text to the model, and a generator class to output plain text from the model. Along the way, the object model can be manipulated in very Pythonic ways (or you can generate an entire model from scratch using the provided message classes). mimelib is compatible with Python 2.x. My goal is to solidify the API and implementation enough for inclusion of mimelib in Python 2.2. mimelib 0.3 is required for the current CVS snapshot of Mailman 2.1 alpha. For online documentation, see http://mimelib.sourceforge.net For project information, see http://sourceforge.net/projects/mimelib For downloading mimelib-0.3.tar.gz, see http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=25568 And of course, there's a mailing list for developers Postings: mimelib-devel(a)lists.sourceforge.net Subscribe: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/mimelib-devel Enjoy, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: 2006 archives already online!
by Owen Taylor 01 May '01

01 May '01

Marc MERLIN <marc_news(a)valinux.com> writes: > On Mon, Apr 30, 2001 at 09:28:51PM +0200, Fil wrote: > > @ Darrell Fuhriman (darrell(a)grumblesmurf.net) : > > > That's why under "archival options" you'll find: > > > > > > "Set date in archive to when the mail is claimed to have been > > > sent, or to the time we resend it?" > > > > > > If you leave it on 'when sent', you deserve the mess you'll get > > > in your archives. > > > > "When sent" is the default. How do you change the default to "When Resent"? > > Shouldn't it be changed in the mailman's Defaults.py ? > > I very firmly believe this, and so do all the people who have archives > showing messages with dates of 2004 or 1990. > http://lists.svlug.org/pipermail/svlug/ > > I've asked the same thing in the past, but it didn't go through. What I did for the gnome.org archives (using mhonarc plus custom perl) is to used the Received: header for the date. Which is, almost always, quite close to the time the person actually sent it, and assuming that your local server's time isn't screwed up (which is a much bigger problem...) does not have the 2004 problem. And it has the advantage over clobber_date of: - Not munging the mail - Not being skewed by moderation delays - Being independent of the archiving process, so if you import a bunch of old mail with incorrect Date: lines into the archiving process you still get the 2004 protection. I haven't looked at the clobber_date implementation recently, so I don't know if these problems have been otherwise addressed. This approach has, anyways, worked well for the 140k messages on mail.gnome.org. I wouldn't be suprised if it has defects though. Regards, Owen

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