Mailman 3 October 2003 - Mailman-Developers

Mailman & CPanel?
by Barry Warsaw Oct. 21, 2003

Oct. 21, 2003

I recently received a message about problems with Mailman and CPanel. I don't know anything about CPanel, or why Mailman and CPanel might not be working together, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't be interested in helping to make sure this is still a viable solution. I know a lot of people use Mailman under CPanel, and I think that's a worthwhile thing to keep available. I'm perplexed by something the message said though: After many complaints, support at the host company said this: "Well, mailman has just released a statement that they will not support CPanel-based mailman installations anymore due to the fact that the CPanel developers have not correctly implemented their solution and causing it to fail, so there isn't much we can do either if both mailman an cpanel developers do not support it. CPanel will most likely be discontinuing it from all servers, too." There are many things I don't understand about this, but let's start with "mailman has just released a statement...". I'm pretty sure /I/ didn't release such a statement, so unless someone has hijacked or forged my address, I don't believe this is accurate. :) Does anybody know anything about this? I'd like to get the record corrected: I have nothing against supporting CPanel in principle, and I'd be willing to learn more about what the problems were, and if there was anything we could do in Mailman to make this combination continue to work. Cheers, -Barry

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Text for the mass subscribe upload a file option.
by John W. Baxter Oct. 20, 2003

Oct. 20, 2003

In Mailman 2.1.1, the mass subscription page has this text under the textbox, introducing the "Choose File" button ....or specify a file to upload: I just talked with a not-dumb list owner who selected an Excel file, producing a wonderful list of 22 non-deletable, non-modifiable entries, which had addresses jumbled together with strings like %0F%00%00. After that conversation, I would suggest that the text read ....or specify a plain text file to upload: Fortunately, the list in question was new, so we elected to blow it away and try again. --John

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'empty module name' error and shunting
by Marc MERLIN Oct. 18, 2003

Oct. 18, 2003

I just wanted to report that one of my mailman servers was also hit by this bug. All mails to the list were stopped until I applied the patch (i.e. the shunted messages weren't the problem, new test messages weren't going through) The bug is described here: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg06288.html And this post has the patch: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg06317.html After the patch, my list became alive again and all messages were succesfully unshunted. Thanks Nadim. Marc -- "A mouse is a device used to point at the xterm you want to type in" - A.S.R. 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/SpamBayes integration?
by Skip Montanaro Oct. 17, 2003

Oct. 17, 2003

I seem to recall that one of the original motivations for SpamBayes was to support spam filtering within Mailman (or nearby, if not within). Has anyone taken steps to more tightly integrate the two aside from doing something like running sb_filter.py in front of Mailman's processing? I think SpamBayes is stable enough at this point to consider integrating the SpamBayes classifier and the web interface to the POP3 proxy with Mailman's engine and administrative interface. I know Greg Ward has done some interesting stuff running SpamBayes in front of many of the mailing lists on mail.python.org. While that's a good first step, I find it a bit incomplete because as a list admin. I can't do anything to control how incoming messages are scored. Ideally, I should be able to train the classifier on mails actually sent to (for example) python-help(a)python.org. I'd consider taking a look at the problem on my own, but I've never even peeked at the Mailman code and don't have any idea where to plug SpamBayes into it. I do know the SpamBayes code to a certain degree and would be happy to work with someone who is familiar with the guts of Mailman to integrate the two tools. Skip

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Bounce Processing / Membership Disabled comments
by Jürgen A.Erhard Oct. 16, 2003

Oct. 16, 2003

Hi Mailmen, just got such a message from python-list: python-list-request> Your membership in the mailing list Python-list has been disabled due python-list-request> to excessive bounces The last bounce received from you was dated python-list-request> 14-Oct-2003. You will not get any more messages from this list until python-list-request> you re-enable your membership. You will receive 3 more reminders like python-list-request> this before your membership in the list is deleted. Please, give me (us) some way to look at a bounce message. I feel so... powerless. It feels Microsofty... or, worse, Apple-y (sorry Chuq ;-). "You don't need to look at a bounce message, you won't understand it anyway." Well, I think I'd do (or I wouldn't be subscribed to this list ;-) I *wanna* see the (or of the) bounce message! (/me stamps foot on ground) Especially since I seem to get quite a ton of mail on that address without a glitch. (Motivation: I've been unsub'd from most Debian lists a couple months ago when GMX (big German freemailer, an address of which I was subscribed to those lists with) had problems with their DNS: Debian's servers couldn't resolve gmx.net for a couple days (or maybe only hours). In *that* case, smartlist sent a copy of a bounce message, from which I could see the DNS problem clearly) Oh, and looking at the Bounce Processing page: since the admin can modify the bounce processing parameters, the "your sub has been disabled" should at least *hint* at what those parameters are for the list. What I envision: the user's web page (not the notification message, it might become to wordy) has a link under the "excessive bounces" text, giving a page with a) the last bounce (without the body, which is largely irrelevant, I think) b) the parameters of the list c) actual numbers telling how many bounces have been received when. Yes, lots of details, but not too much. Don't know how hard this is to implement... took a peek at the code, but I haven't quite grasped the relation between Bouncer.py and Bouncers/*. Oh, and while I'm at it: the default is 5.0 bounces. The doc is unclear: if there are hard bounces and soft bounces in one day, does the count rise by 1.5, or 1, or 0.5? I'd think it goes up 1 if any hard bounces have been received, and by 0.5 if only soft bounces came in. That right? Looking at Bouncer.py, it seems the first bounce of a day determines the increase. Though... I haven't seen evidence of soft bounces. And, come to think of it, what does bounce_info_stale_after actually do? Does it discard all bounce info (set all counters to 0) when no bounce has happened for 7 days? Which would imply that I can collect 5 bounces over a long period of time, as long as no more than 7 days pass between bounces. Worst case would then be: 5 bounces in a month... holy basscrap, Bassman, tell me that I'm wrong! ;-) Bye, J -- Jürgen A. Erhard Invasion! http://invasion.jerhard.org There's an NDA in the FSF: Free Software FouNDAtion.

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spam filtering.
by Mike Lucas Oct. 15, 2003

Oct. 15, 2003

I found the bounce_matching_headers option under the spam filters. My question is this option lets you hold messeages that meet the filter you put here but what if we want to just have it delete the message automaticlly? We have spam tagging on our mail that puts a tag in in the subject line of ****spam**** and we want to have mailman see that tag and delete the message instead of holding it for moderation. Am I missing a setting? Is this possible? Or do we have to hack the source code? Thanks, Mike

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Bug in mailman 2.1 with unsubscribe
by Kory Wheatley Oct. 15, 2003

Oct. 15, 2003

I sent this message out once, but know one responded to my message Is there a bug in mailman 2.1, when trying to use the global password I cannot unsubscribe subscribers from a mailing list using an email command. I've tried the following, "I've been able to do this in past verisons with Mailman". I sent a request to "test-request(a)mm.isu.edu" with the following unsubscribe globalpassword address=emailaccount(a)isu.edu end Any solution or work around for this problem. -- Kory Wheatley Academic Computing Analyst Sr. Phone 282-3874 ######################################### Everything must point to him.

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Serious I/O contention issue
by Mike Bradley Oct. 15, 2003

Oct. 15, 2003

I have a rather large mailing list (35000 members) which is used for announcements only, but I have been experiencing terrible performance problems when the qrunner is active. The mail server is Postfix, Mailman is version 2.1.3 (previous versions showed the same problems). When I send an outgoing mail, the qrunner processes take up all my CPU and the hard disk becomes inaccessible due to constant IO. Even when there is very little activity in the list and the queues are cleared, the server locks up for several seconds every time an operation is performed. I have not had much experience with Python, but have tried to track down what might be causing this. It seems that the OutgoingRunner and VirginRunner in particular are causing the worst of the problems, specifically during load and save of the mlist. It appears that the list is being reloaded or resaved from disk after EVERY operation (so rendering useless the handy looking caching of the list in the main Runner class). I am not familiar with the exact way the application operates, but are the mlist arrays shared/marshalled across the qrunner processes via the _listcache? If so, then would it be possible to eliminate the mlist.Load() in the OutgoingRunner and implement delayed saving in the mailing list class so that Save() didn't cause a write to disk each time? For the moment, I have had to shut down my list completely as it is chewing my server! Mike -- Make more of your Nokia Phone with LogoManager http://www.logomanager.co.uk

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question about adding lists to a list.
by Mike Lucas Oct. 15, 2003

Oct. 15, 2003

I have a list that has other lists subcribed to it and these other lists send to more lists, which finnally send to users. My problem is that these are all showing up to be moderated with this message " Blind carbon copies or other implicit destinations are not allowed. Try reposting your message by explicitly including the list address in the To: or Cc: fields. " we have a RE in the accept_these_nonmembers field that lets all nonmembers from our domain send to the lists but when a top level list sends to the other lists it must be using a BCC field. Any info would help a lot. Thanks, Mike

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Sending queued messages after a system down
by Dan Ohnesorg Oct. 15, 2003

Oct. 15, 2003

My user has noticed, that Mailman 2.1 sends messages in wrong order, when the messages are sent from queue. My host was down for some time, we have only accepted new messages into mailman queue, mailman process was not running. After starting the mailman with mailmanctl -s start, the newest messages are sent first, the oldiest last. This is not big problem, but can be probably easy fixed. cheers dan

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