Mailman-Developers April 2002

mailman-developers@python.org

65 participants
119 discussions

Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman password and administrative reminders
by Dan Mick 14 Aug '03

14 Aug '03

? 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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External subscriber lists in 2.1
by J C Lawrence 23 Aug '02

23 Aug '02

Barry, In 2.1 when used with external subscriber storage (eg SQL), will the new equivalent of qrunner request and load the entire subscriber DB onto the heap prior to broadcast? <<Yeah, I'm cheating and being lazy on not checking the source myself>> Reason: This poses scaling problems for lists with very large numbers of subscribers. I'd suggest paging thru the set in blocks. ObExcuse: Chap on -users asking about millions of subscribers. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

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suggestion for configure
by Ron Jarrell 12 Jul '02

12 Jul '02

Add a --with-fqdn and --with-url or equivalent. The current cvs snapshot can't guess my fqdn on my production box, and it's used now to build a web of interconnected addresses, as well as populate the VIRTUAL_HOSTS table, so I had to do a bunch of deleting and repairing in mm_cfg. I can, if I *remember*, which I've already forgotten once, fix it when I build by setting FQDN and URL environment variables, so that configure picks those up by default, but I have a habit of just looking at config.status to see how I ran configure the last time. Having an explicit configure switch would be nice.

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Interesting study -- spam on posted addresses...
by Chuq Von Rospach 05 Jun '02

05 Jun '02

Interesting article on slashdot: <http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/02/17/2031249> Basically, DSLreports did a test, and found that e-mail addresses posted on a web site could start seeing spam in as little as 8 hours. I mention it for two reasons. One, since mail lists manage e-mail addresses (and archives of e-mail addresses), it is yet antother indication of just why we have to be careful about presenting and disclosing that stuff. And second, since one of the addresses presented and disclosed is that of the admin, we really need to come up with ways that allow newbies to contact an admin without easily disclosing addresses to spammers. And, unfortunately, the security problems with formmail.pl have shown THAT isn't really the answer... Chuq -- Chuq Von Rospach (chuqui(a)plaidworks.com -- http://www.chuqui.com/) Will Geek for hardware. Very funny, Scotty. Now beam my clothes down here, will you?

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Updated dupe removal patch
by Marc MERLIN 12 May '02

12 May '02

It took all of my sunday, but I just finished porting Ben Gertzfield's excellent dupe removal patch to mailman cvs (I also had to learn some python in the process. I'm starting to believe that Mailman is a conspiracy to get people to learn python :-p) In a nutshell, the patch does two things: 1) it does not send you your list copy if - your subscribed Email address is already in the headers - you already received the message through another list (Cc accross two lists or more on the same site) 2) The new "nodupes" setting is really something you probably want as a default on all lists. I also had lists were people wanted notmetoo as a default too. Ben's fix for that is to have a bitfield per list that you can set and that states which options newly added users get. As Ben said, this breaks the one patch one functionality rule, but when I ported his work to mailman-cvs, I realized that it didn't make sense to take them apart. However, Barry, if that would stop you from merging #1 in CVS, I could remove it, but I'm not sure why one would want to. I've done reasonable tests to make sure I didn't break all of mailman in the process, and the core logic hasn't changed, so the basic functionality is the same that Ben had written and that has been used for 6-9mo? on the debian lists now. In other words, it should work (it does for me, and I'm already running it on my production mailman-cvs list server), but there is always the chance that there might be a corner case buglet left somewhere. Considering this was a pain to port, and how this puts to rest many of the reply-to munging discussions (the only real argument for reply-to munging is that it "solves" the duplicate mails you other receive when people use reply to all), I'm hoping that this could make it in (wink, wink :-D) Thanks, 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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2.1b1 Moderation and From: vs. Sender:
by Harald Koch 07 May '02

07 May '02

I have a small problem with a moderated list as part of my upgrades from 2.0.8 to 2.1b1. This is a "joke of the day" style list. I'm supposed to be the only one who can submit messages to the list; all of the members are moderated (except me). Outgoing messages are stored in a queue, and one is sent automatically by cron once per day. With 2.0.8, I was processing a message by adding a Sender: tag with my address; my address was listed in the 'posters' variable. With "USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER = 1" in my mm_cfg.py, this worked. The list upgrade process handled the 'posters' variable correctly; my list address was marked *unmoderated*, and the other addresses were copied into the new 'accept_these_nonmembers' field. (Good attention to detail, there, btw; kudos!) However, my 'trick' of adding a Sender: field doesn't work anymore, and I get a confusing log/hold message that says "humour post from chk(a)cfrq.net held: Post by a moderated member". 'chk(a)cfrq.net' is not moderated. It turns out that, in order to find the moderation flag of the user that send a message, Handlers/Moderate.py calls msg.get_senders, which returns a *list* of senders with the Sender: last; Moderate.py only looks at the first return value, which is the From: header. The address in the From: field *is* moderated, and so the message is rejected. Later, however, Handlers/Hold.py routine hold_for_approval calls the old msg.get_sender (singular vs. plural), which returns the Sender: field if "USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER = 1" is set, which is why I get the confusing log message. So, two things: 1) The message rejection is confusing. 2) What's the right way to do this under 2.1? Thanks, -- Harald Koch <chk(a)pobox.com> "It takes a child to raze a village." -Michael T. Fry

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Well, here's an interesting one
by Ron Jarrell 06 May '02

06 May '02

Apr 10 03:19:57 2002 (12285) message is unparsable: 1018423196.419311+a81685d7af 1f6631ce6392a83aff01fde476543f Apr 10 03:19:57 2002 (12285) lost data files for filebase: 1018423196.419311+a81 685d7af1f6631ce6392a83aff01fde476543f I don't mind the unparseability so much as the fact that it lost the files, so now I can't see *why* it was unparseable... Based on the syslog, I see which one it must have been. Looks like it was spam anyway, so hopefully it was just their spamming package mangling the message.

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after processing a confirm in the subject line, the body should be ignored (v2.1b1)
by Georg Koch 06 May '02

06 May '02

Hi all, if you send a "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" command via email to list-request@mailmanhost you get a confirmation message in reply which says "To confirm that you want to be removed from this mailing list, simply reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact.". If you do so, but include the body of the confirm message, you get TWO messages back: a success message and a long error message stating "There were problems with the email commands you sent". I find this confusing and think you cannot expect everyone to understand "reply" as "reply with an empty body". I would therefore propose the following behaviour change: After a confirm command from the Subject: header field of a message is processed successfully, the body of this message is ignored (not processed). -- -- Georg Koch (koch(a)cochrane.de) | Phone: +49 761 203 6710 German Cochrane Centre | Fax: +49 761 203 6712 Mail: Institute of Medical Biometry and Medical Informatics Stefan-Meier-Strasse 26, D-79104 Freiburg, Germany "All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence, and then success is sure." (Mark Twain)

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Number of Mailman users?
by Ellen Spertus 06 May '02

06 May '02

Any ballpark estimates on the number of Mailman subscribers globally? Given that the FAQ mentions a list with 147,000 users, it seems safe to say that there are millions of Mailman users. What do you think? I'd like a number for a grant report I'm writing. Ellen

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Re: Editability of messages
by Marc MERLIN 06 May '02

06 May '02

On Mon, Apr 15, 2002 at 07:55:01AM -0400, Tom Neff wrote: > "Billie R. McNamara" <billie(a)tnhillbillie.net> wrote: > >We are using version 2.0.8 for a moderated list. But, we aren't able to > >edit messages before approving them (for example, to delete just one > >inappropriate word). > > > >How can we do this? > > There is a FAQ entry that wants you to hand edit various spool files, but > you can patch 2.0.8 to allow message editing. I think the patch will be necessary for mailman 2.1, it unfortunately stores the message on disk in a database format, making hand editing on the mm server not that easy. 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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Mailman-Developers April 2002