Mailman 3 March 2002 - Mailman-Developers

Problem with Postfix virtual support in current CVS
by Carson Gaspar 05 Mar '02

05 Mar '02

I _think_ I set this up properly, but please tell me if I got something wrong: $ bin/dumpdb /var/mailman/lists/bluefeather/config.db | grep host_name\' 'host_name': 'bluefeather.org', >From mm_cfg.py: MTA = 'Postfix' POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = ['bluefeather.org', 'boardstiffny.org'] Yet after running genaliases, my /var/mailman/data/virtual-mailman is zero-length. -- Carson Gaspar - carson(a)taltos.org Queen Trapped in a Butch Body

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Handling bounces correctly?
by Dan Mick 04 Mar '02

04 Mar '02

Well, OK. I guess that's how it's designed: # Otherwise, we should just forward this message to the list # owner, because there's nothing we can do with it. Be sure to # point the envelope sender at the site owner for any bounces to # list owners. (from Mailman/Queue/BounceRunner.py) Seems like making that behavior configurable might be useful. But the real issue is that the bounce message is *so* nonstandard. It didn't match *any* of the stuff in Mailman/Bouncers, and there are a lot of tests there. I'd complain to the postmaster at that site and tell him to please configure DSNs like all good mailhosts should be doing. I've sidestepped this issue by using VERP on all my outgoing mail, so bounces are always caught before they even get to Bouncers/*... but that's because I can have Postfix do it for me relatively-efficiently, and because I don't have that bad a bandwidth restriction; I know it's not an option for everyone. I suppose the other thing to do is fix up/add a Bouncers/* module to catch these messages; I have hacked SimpleMatch.py before for just this purpose (the hotpop stanza is mine). > On Mon 04 Mar, Dan Mick wrote: > > I'm confused. Can you forward me one, sanitized if you wish, > > in toto (i.e. with all its headers, so don't use an MUA to > > forward it, but capture it to a file and send it)? > > > Attached - the actual list is called modular-it as you can see but in > all other respects the aliases etc are identical to the test ones I have > been describing. > > > > > -- > Colin Mackinlay

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Handling bounces correctly?
by Dan Mick 04 Mar '02

04 Mar '02

> My cvs installation is sending me bounces rather than processing them. > > Looking at the aliases automatically added to postfix there are two > duplicates: > > test-admin /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces test > test-bounces /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces test > > This seems to be true for all lists. Am I missing something obvious?! That's the way the aliases are supposed to be set up. "Sending me...rather than processing"... does that mean they're coming addressed to you specifically, or to the 'owner' set up for the 'test' list, or some other path? Note: those literal aliases above are not correct; they need a '|' character, and should probably have quotes around the entire RHS.

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Do we need the password in the HTML of the confirm page?
by Marc MERLIN 04 Mar '02

04 Mar '02

When I went to: http://gandalf-lists.merlins.org/lists/confirm/test2/372ff4ab4ca390f3c3bfab… (don't bother trying, it's localhost on my laptop :-D) I get an HTML page to confirm my subscription. I haven't looked at the code in details, but does mailman need to put the list password in cleartext in the HTML? (if the answer is "yes", then never mind) It's not the end of the world, but if someone puts my Email by mistake (one letter typo or something in a company), I can get his mailman password, and with a little luck that password could work in other places too (not that the person is supposed to use the same password, but...) Marc -- 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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Handling bounces correctly?
by Colin Mackinlay 04 Mar '02

04 Mar '02

My cvs installation is sending me bounces rather than processing them. Looking at the aliases automatically added to postfix there are two duplicates: test-admin /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces test test-bounces /usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces test This seems to be true for all lists. Am I missing something obvious?! -- Colin Mackinlay

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A thought on SMTPHOST
by Chuq Von Rospach 04 Mar '02

04 Mar '02

Just wanted to bluesky this a bit, and make a suggestion to Barry. I'm starting to see volume stress on my E250, mostly due to high volume (14 million pieces of email last month, more or less) and disk I/O issues (only 2 SCSI drives in the beast). I've pretty much maxed out capacity on that thing unless I wanted to stuff in more drives, and the cost of a good, fast hard drive for a Sun box and the cost (to me) for a good, fast MacOS X box aren't much different... And for some reason, my bosses like the idea of MacOS X boxes. So I'm getting ready to start what's known as my "smurf army" in my design documents: a farm of small, inexpensive, fast machines set up specifically to deliver mail as quickly as possible. (the first three are ultra-5's, mostly because another project went away and we got them for free....) And I've been looking at the best way to interface all of these with the delivery boxes. With Mailman, that means SMTPHOST. The way SMTPHOST is set up, to implement a smurf army would require setting up a round robin DNS of the various hosts. That'll work, but... If one of the boxes goes down for some reason, some percentage of Mailman deliveries would fail when it hits that part of the round robin, unless I tweak the round robin constantly, which would require setting up a DNS box among the smurf to delegate the round robin to instead of the corporate DNS, which is not a good idea on any number of levels for us... Which got me thinking. You could put the smurf army behind a load balancing box (mac.com's SMTP is that way), but... I don't want to spend the money on that, administer that, or do it that way. I looked at what it'd take to hack multiple SMTP host support into Mailman. Not a huge deal, actually, but then unless Barry buys the hack back, I'm forked. I'd rather not, although it'd be a nice setup for larger installations. So... I suddenly realized we have a process to handle this. MX records. What if Mailman were made MX aware? You could then set up SMTPHOST to point to a DNS name. If that DNS name has an MX definition for it, Mailman would use it instead of the IP. That would make this backwards compatible, since under almost all circumstances, the MX record will be pointing to the machine if it exists (if it points elsewhere, but you're using as an SMTP host, what in the heck are you doing? I can only think of one scenario where that makes sense (dedicated incoming SMTP beastie) and if you're that large -- you probably want this hack) This would allow you to define your "smurf army" any way you want, as big as you want, and it's self-healing to failures. Imagine the following scenario A record: smtp-out.lists.apple.com MX 5 smurf1.lists.apple.com MX 5 smurf2.lists.apple.com MX 5 smurf3.lists.apple.com MX 5 smurf4.lists.apple.com MX 20 lists.apple.com MX 30 applenews.lists.apple.com As a forinstance. When qrunner starts up, it grabs the MX data and stores it. Every time it has to delivery something, it picks one of the MX of 5 and delivers to it. If that delivery fails, it grabs another 5. If all 4 fail, it backs off to the 20, then the 30. Only if all six boxes fail does qrunner drop out and retry later. This allows each smurf to load-balance itself. If it gets busy, it stops accepting mail and lets someone else handle it. You could hack this kind of configuration into mailman itself, but one advantage of the MX setup is if you run multiple servers feeding into that farm, configuration is in one place for the farm. It doesn't seem supporting MX (perhaps as a configurable option?) would be difficult, but I haven't looked into the python library code yet. Barry, what do you think about this? -- Chuq Von Rospach, Architech chuqui(a)plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/ Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.

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password reminders on umbrella lists
by Ron Jarrell 03 Mar '02

03 Mar '02

On my test server I've got an umbrella list, which is set for "password reminders to owner" and "owner suffix is -owner". The only thing subscribed to is is a list that gates into a local newsgroup. Today (because the qrunner was stopped for the last couple of days) the newsgroup got a message posted to it - it was the note from the umbrella list, which, despite the umbrella settings, was sent to the member lists, not the list-owners, and which contained the password, which I rapidly changed after cancelling the article... Lucky it's a test list. This seems, oh, bad, to me...

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Bug in email confirmation of subscription?
by Colin Mackinlay 03 Mar '02

03 Mar '02

When new members subscribe to mailing lists on my CVS mailman installation they receive the usual message requiring confirmation. When replying to this message they are correctly added to the list of pending subscriptions for moderator approval but receive an error message which makes it look like a failure. I have attached the three relevant messages: plsconfirm (from mailman after a webpage subscription request) reply (sent by me) error (the message sent back from mailman) You can try this for yourself, the webpage is http://mackinlay.demon.co.uk/mailman/listinfo/test -- Colin Mackinlay Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 12:40:07 +0000 From: test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk Subject: Mailman results for Test To: colin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk This is an automated response. There were problems with the email commands you sent to Mailman via the administrative address test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk. To obtain instructions on valid Mailman email commands, send email to test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk with the word "help" in the subject line or in the body of the message. If you want to reach the human being that manages this mailing list, please send your message to test-admin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk. The following is a detailed description of the problems. ***** confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 Your request has been forwarded to the list moderator for approval. Command? On Sun 03 Mar, test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk wrote: Command? > Command? > Mailing list subscription confirmation notice for mailin... Command? > Command? > We have received a request from 192.168.0.2 for subscrip... >>>>> >>>>> Too many errors encountered; the rest of the message is ignored: > > email address, "david(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk", to the > > test(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk mailing list. To confirm that you want to > > be added to this mailing list, simply reply to this message, keeping > > the Subject: header intact. Or visit this web page: > > > > http://mackinlay.demon.co.uk/mailman/confirm/test/cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92… > > 5f5bb981 > > > > > > Or include the following line -- and only the following line -- in a > > message to test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk: > > > > confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 > > > > Note that simply sending a `reply' to this message should work from > > most mail readers, since that usually leaves the Subject: line in the > > right form (additional "Re:" text in the Subject: is okay). > > > > If you do not wish to be subscribed from this list, please simply > > disregard this message. If you think you are being maliciously > > subscribed to the list, or have any other questions, send them to > > test-admin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk. > > > > -- > Colin Mackinlay > Date: Sun, 03 Mar 2002 12:38:53 +0000 From: test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk Subject: confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 To: david(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk Mailing list subscription confirmation notice for mailing list Test We have received a request from 192.168.0.2 for subscription of your email address, "david(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk", to the test(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk mailing list. To confirm that you want to be added to this mailing list, simply reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact. Or visit this web page: http://mackinlay.demon.co.uk/mailman/confirm/test/cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92… Or include the following line -- and only the following line -- in a message to test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk: confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 Note that simply sending a `reply' to this message should work from most mail readers, since that usually leaves the Subject: line in the right form (additional "Re:" text in the Subject: is okay). If you do not wish to be subscribed from this list, please simply disregard this message. If you think you are being maliciously subscribed to the list, or have any other questions, send them to test-admin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk. Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2002 12:36:37 +0000 (GMT) From: Colin Mackinlay <colin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk> Subject: Re: confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 To: test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk On Sun 03 Mar, test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk wrote: > > Mailing list subscription confirmation notice for mailing list Test > > We have received a request from 192.168.0.2 for subscription of your > email address, "david(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk", to the > test(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk mailing list. To confirm that you want to > be added to this mailing list, simply reply to this message, keeping > the Subject: header intact. Or visit this web page: > > http://mackinlay.demon.co.uk/mailman/confirm/test/cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92… > 5f5bb981 > > > Or include the following line -- and only the following line -- in a > message to test-request(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk: > > confirm cbd699d455efb2d25e579de92dfe34aa5f5bb981 > > Note that simply sending a `reply' to this message should work from > most mail readers, since that usually leaves the Subject: line in the > right form (additional "Re:" text in the Subject: is okay). > > If you do not wish to be subscribed from this list, please simply > disregard this message. If you think you are being maliciously > subscribed to the list, or have any other questions, send them to > test-admin(a)mackinlay.demon.co.uk. > -- Colin Mackinlay

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Missing footers with latest CVS
by Dan Mick 03 Mar '02

03 Mar '02

Installed latest CVS yesterday, and notice now that some posters are not getting footers added to their messages. I suspect the footer-add-based- on-language code is at fault, but I haven't had time to isolate a pattern yet. Anyway, consider this Distant Early Warning that that code isn't working for some otherwise-untroubled list members.

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Working on memory leaks
by barry＠zope.com 01 Mar '02

01 Mar '02

I've got some good leads on the memory leak problem in the qrunners in MM2.1. I'm seeing some very strange behavior. I'm going to try to hang out on the irc channel[1] in case anybody else is interested. -Barry irc.openprojects.net #mailman

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