Mailman 3 February 2003 - Mailman-Developers

Bounce removal parameters default values
by Greg Stark 23 Oct '03

23 Oct '03

I find I am being removed from mailman mailing lists left and right. I believe the default values for the bounce removal should be reconsidered. It's possible that you haven't had many users in my situation and so haven't really had a chance to tune these parameters on the low end yet. But they clearly aren't working for me at a few sites. My particular situation is that my site has seen fit to filter viruses by refusing delivery. This causes a bounce from the remote MTA every time someone sends me an Outlook virus. Why my site administrators felt this was necessary is a question for another day, it's not like I use Outlook or like my spam filters wouldn't have thrown these messages away anyways, but whatever. The net result is that some small fraction of messages to me bounce and list management software notices this. The only reason I became aware of the problem was because ezmlm also does this type of processing but it sends a warning message before removing users. It only removes you if the warning message itself bounces. In fact it sends two such warning messages and only removes the user if *both* bounce. This provides the user with a chance to react to the first message and fix the problem -- if they ever see the message. I could beg for a similar feature in mailman, but I'm not sure it's necessary. But I am sure it's necessary to tune the bounce processing parameters. The relatively few bounces I'm generating shouldn't be causing me to get removed when all the real messages are being delivered fine. It seems the legitimate messages that are correctly delivered should reset the count of bounces to 0. Reading the source it seems it has to see DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES such legitimate posts between messages. I'm fairly convinced this parameter should always be 0. If any successful delivery occurs the user should never be removed due to bounces. What I don't understand is how DEFAULT_MAX_POSTS_BETWEEN_BOUNCES relates to the parameters I see in the admin. None of the parameters in the admin corresponds to this. How is it calculated? -- greg

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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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installation path
by syed 18 Mar '03

18 Mar '03

Hi! >From the documentation, the default installation path is /home/mailman. It is practical we install mailman in /home/mailman or we should install it at other location? (e.g /var/www/html) Or do you have special installation path to install mailman. I'm asking this silly question because i'm quiet confuse when other software(actually i'm trying to setup savannah) always asking me where is mailman cgi-bin path? Thanks, newbie -- Syed Ahmad Shazali Syed Abdullah Researcher, Open Source Development MIMOS Berhad, Malaysia http://opensource.mimos.my http://asiaosc.org

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Alternative MemberAdaptors
by barry＠python.org 05 Mar '03

05 Mar '03

This message is primary for those of you writing or using alternative MemberAdaptor implementations (e.g. SQL). Yesterday I checked in a working implementation of a member adaptor based on BerkeleyDB. It seems to greatly improve the memory footprint for really huge lists, at the cost of greater administrative overhead (because you have to know how to setup and manage BerkeleyDBs), and potentially slower performance (I haven't benchmarked it; this is just based on my experience with BerkeleyDB in general). I've found a few things during this experience that point to things we ought to improve. I don't have a lot of time right now, but I wanted to put this out there to start the discussion. I'll quickly mention a few things. - I wanted to hook into the BDB transaction (txn) machinery, and I found a convenient hook. I overloaded MailList.Lock() to include a txn begin, MailList.Save() to do a txn commit, and MailList.Unlock() to do a txn abort. This seems to work well as long as aborting after committing is harmless (it is in BDB). I'd like to get feedback from the SQL folks (or other MemberAdaptor developers) on whether we need more explicit transaction support or whether the basically necessary hooks are already there. - To make this work, however, I found I had to change the order of when the extend.py hook gets run. Specifically, I needed it to run /before/ the list is locked in MailList.__init__(), otherwise locking contructors don't hook into the machinery. I want to commit this change but I don't want to break other MemberAdaptors or extend.py hooks. - We really need to optimize the MemberAdaptor API and the implementations that use them. Especially methods that return lists, e.g. getMembers() and friends. Right now, everything has to return a list, but I could do much better by returning iterators, because I can load my iterator up with a BDB cursor. This has the advantage of not requiring the entire member database to be loaded into memory just to iterate over it. Unfortunately, too much of the rest of the code assumes these methods return lists, and while I started to go down the iterator path, I backed out of it because of the complexity. There are other optimizations that would require a bit more thought. E.g. the admin's Membership List page seems to require that the entire member database be iterated over to chunkify and bucketize. Fixing this probably requires both changes to the u/i and changes to the interface. It also makes life more difficult for OldStyleMemberships, although BDBMemberAdaptor can probably be fairly easily elaborated. I'd like to hear from other member adaptor implementations on their thoughts here. - I'd love for any BerkeleyDB experts to review the BDBMemberAdaptor code, especially in some of the choices I've made for creating and opening the environment. I had a lot of practical problems with this part of the code, especially in getting multiple processes to cooperate reasonably. Any BerkeleyDB experts out there? (I'm fairly happy with the schemas, at least for the current MemberAdaptor API). - I'm leaning heavily toward having this stuff in Mailman 2.2 and /not/ porting it to 2.1.x. Too many changes for a micro release, although it makes project management more complicated, especially in merging fixes back into the 2.1.x maintenance branch. Sigh. Okay, I'm out of time for today. Any feedback will be appreciated, even if I can't respond immediately. Also, the BerkeleyDB based member adaptor seems to work, but should be considered experimental. See the BDBMemberAdaptor.py comments for how to hook this up to a mailing list. There is currently no migration tool from classic member adaptors to BDBMemberAdaptors, although I intend to write such a beast and run a few of my personal lists on the code to flesh things out. Enjoy, -Barry

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public archives and email adresses
by Kasper Daniel Hansen 05 Mar '03

05 Mar '03

Hi I've recently created a mailing list with mailman and are quite satisfied. However I have one simple question/request: If I have public archives and a member of the list has a signature in their email reader, this signature is included in the archive. But - at least in my list - it is quite common for signatures to include the posters email adress which therefore are being made accesible on a public webpage. Is it possible to strip messages of the signature before they are being archived? If so - how? /Kasper

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API Mailman
by Manuel "SiMaR" Rodriguez 05 Mar '03

05 Mar '03

Hi i am a new developer in Mailman. I need know if exist a function to retrive a admin password like.... oldpw = mlist.getMemberPassword(address) Thanks! PS: Sorry For my bad english SiMaR simar(a)rodriguezmanuel.com.ar --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.449 / Virus Database: 251 - Release Date: 01/27/2003

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re: bounce action notification
by Charlie Clark 28 Feb '03

28 Feb '03

On 2003-02-26 at 18:00:06 [+0100], mailman-developers-request(a)python.org wrote: > > Chuq Von Rospach wrote: > > you go tell hotmail to fix itself, Barry. > > ...or tell your users to drop that piece of crap. > > yes yes, I know, millions on the Internet, elitist attitude, yadda yadda. Actually it's worse than that it's counterproductive and that for two reasons: criticising the what a user uses is implied criticism of the user and this is not very friendly and as Chuq has pointed out may cause them to leave; more importantly, however, the big mail services are interested in having as good a relationship with list-servers as well. They like bounces as much as we do so they are really happy the fewer they get. Talking to the admins can be surprisingly helpful. I've got a list with a huge bias towards hotmail and will be talking to them about working together as well as possible. I'll post any useful response. Charlie

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: Re: Subject's being mangled (I'mextendeding the length of thissubject to see how it wraps)
by Tokio Kikuchi 28 Feb '03

28 Feb '03

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2003-February/014854.ht… You could have searched the archive. David Gibbs wrote: > I'm sorry, I've lost track of patches. > > Things are crazy around here ... got code freeze at work in about 2 > weeks and we just found a major problem :( > > Can you refresh my memory? > > Thanks! > > david > > At 06:02 PM 2/27/2003, you wrote: > >> Have you tried my latest patch ? >> You should make sure that patched version is properly installed >> and restart mailmanctl. >> >> Tokio >> >> David Gibbs wrote: >> >>> "Tokio Kikuchi" <tkikuchi(a)is.kochi-u.ac.jp> wrote in message >>> news:3E597D05.4000407@is.kochi-u.ac.jp... >>> >>>> Use of Latin-1 character in english list is a different matter. >>>> If the subscribers use these character in your list, then see >>>> http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2003-February/026558.html >>>> >>> >>> >>> I don't think that the character set relates to how the subject is being >>> wrapped ... look at this thread ... there are a bunch of TAB >>> characters in >>> the text that (IMHO) shouldn't be there. >>> david >> >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mailman-Developers mailing list >> Mailman-Developers(a)python.org >> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers > > > -- > | Internet: david(a)midrange.com > | WWW: http://david.fallingrock.net > | AIM: MidrangeMan > | > | We're not in the middle of nowhere... > | we're on the outskirts of everywhere! > | - DMRoth (adapted) > >

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Subject's being mangled
by David Gibbs 28 Feb '03

28 Feb '03

Folks: I've noticed some odd behavior in the latest CVS that I updated to ... the subject line is being treated as if it's blank. Here's an example of a message that was processed by one of my lists ... > Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" > X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1+ > Subject: > Re: V4R4 to V5R1 upgrade [was Re: Off-topic, and not sorry one iota] > X-BeenThere: midrange-l(a)midrange.com > X-Mailman-Version: 2.1+ > Precedence: list Notice that the subject is on a seperate line. This list does NOT have a prefix configured. Any ideas? Thanks! david

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[Mailman-Developers] ng-arch: New list for discussing a better archiver
by Andrew Kuchling 28 Feb '03

28 Feb '03

I've started a mailing list, ng-arch, for design and development of a better mail archiving system. To subscribe go to: http://www.amk.ca/mailman/listinfo/ng-arch It would be nice if this new archiver's implementation can be suitable for inclusion with Mailman 2.2 (and can be implemented in time), but if that's not possible it might be a standalone project. --amk (www.amk.ca) BASSANIO: The world is still deceived with ornament. -- _The Merchant of Venice_, III, ii

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Mailman-Developers February 2003