Mailman 3 January 2004 - Mailman-Developers

Calling all Mailman hosting sites
by Barry Warsaw 25 Feb '04

25 Feb '04

I've had a lot of requests recently for information about Mailman hosting. As a general rule I don't like to recommend any particular hosting company. But if you do provide Mailman hosting facilities, please make sure you've added yourself to the PythonHosting wiki: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/moinmoin/PythonHosting I usually point people here for more information, so please make sure you're on that list. Now to check the FAQ and see if it points here... -Barry

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Tracking down a permissions bug in attachments
by Andrew Mellinger 09 Feb '04

09 Feb '04

Y'all, I think I may have found a bug with the attachments code and hoped that you guys could give me some input. When trying to save an attachment my installation of mailman provides the following error. +---- Jan 23 07:05:52 2004 (24615) Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 110, in _oneloop self._onefile(msg, msgdata) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 160, in _onefile keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Queue/ArchRunner.py", line 73, in _dispose mlist.ArchiveMail(msg) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/Archiver.py", line 208, in ArchiveMail h.processUnixMailbox(f) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Archiver/pipermail.py", line 544, in processUnixMailbox m = mbox.next() File "/usr/pkg/lib/python2.2/mailbox.py", line 34, in next return self.factory(_Subfile(self.fp, start, stop)) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py", line 89, in scrubber return mailbox.scrub(msg) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Mailbox.py", line 109, in scrub return self._scrubber(self._mlist, msg) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py", line 219, in process url = save_attachment(mlist, part, dir, filter_html=0) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py", line 344, in save_attachment makedirs(fsdir) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py", line 336, in makedirs os.path.walk(dir, twiddle, None) File "/usr/pkg/lib/python2.2/posixpath.py", line 279, in walk func(arg, top, names) File "/usr/pkg/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Scrubber.py", line 335, in twiddle os.chmod(dirname, 02775) OSError: [Errno 1] Operation not permitted: '/var/db/mailman/archives/private/rq-rules/attachments/20040123/72aeb309' +---------- Now, it looks to me like Mailman is trying to set permissions on the newly created directory to 02775. I'm running on NetBSD which doesn't let anyone but the superuser set the 2000 (setuid) bit. I imagine this setting (02775) was done for linux which overloads the setuid bit for as 'set group' on new files. Does this sound like a good assessment? If so, is there a generic way to turn this sort of thing off in a config? (I searched by couldn't find anything.) Isn't this something that should be handled at build time? Thanks for any feedback! -Andrew

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AOL's requirements for spam complaints
by Somuchfun 03 Feb '04

03 Feb '04

Ok, I just got off the phone with AOL's postmaster dept. and found out the whole scoop why they have to strip out the To: address from complaints. There was a lawsuit of breach of privacy so AOL can no longer share the To: field in their feedback loop. So here is the solution: Mailman needs to create something like an x-client-id header that has the recipient email address in it because this header will stay intact when a complaint comes back. This header needs to be created whether mailman runs in personalization mode or not. So the questions is not can mailman do it or not?

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Translation F'up2 => Reply-To
by Michael Heydekamp 03 Feb '04

03 Feb '04

Hi, anybody here who could deliver Python code for the following? In news2mail direction, I'd like to "translate" the F'up2 header (containing one or more newsgroups) to the Reply-To: header by preserving any already existing Reply-To addresses. One of four mailing lists is assigned to each of four newsgroups respectively. These mailing list addresses shall be concatenated to the Reply-To: header. Other arbitrary newsgroups in the F'up2 header should simply be disregarded. In mail2news direction I managed this by tweaking the INN filter, but I'm far beyond from being that familiar with Python as I am with Perl. Some example code to start with would already help. Michael

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A bit of perspective ....
by Kevin McCann 02 Feb '04

02 Feb '04

Maybe I ought to explain what I'm up against. At work I'm running Lyris. I have hundreds of lists and many, many members. I also have Mailman running a handful of small-ish lists (and at home I run a server with Mailman for a personal interest discussion list of nearly 1,000 members). My organization (and in fact, my entire industry of international development) is embracing open source with a fervor and one of the things on the to-do list is to move all services that run on commercial software to open source software. NT, IIS, ColdFusion and Lyris, are, for all intents and purposes, history. I now have online communities that have been very much accustomed to Lyris features, performance, functionality, etc. Not to mention the web interfaces that marry Lyris and other online resources (profiles, documents, calendar, etc.). I have the unenviable challenge of moving these people to a Mailman environment without making them feel like it is a step backward. I would really like to believe that this is possible. I'm not ready to give up on this quite yet. I have looked at other open source MLM's, and for one reason or another, the others aren't at all usable. Mailman is the closest thing I see to a solution. Anyway, that's my sob story. I'll continue to look forward for solutions. Flame away if it'll make you feel like a better person, but I'm not giving up that easily. - Kevin

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I'm hiring...
by Chuq Von Rospach 02 Feb '04

02 Feb '04

god, I just realized I forgot to post these here. Hope you don't mind, Barry. Full-time postmaster position (primarily administrative, not technical): http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001267.html "List mom": (moderately technical, with internal evangelism and needs analysis, and helping us figure out the next generation of "all this stuff") http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001254.html And finally: (very technical, short-term contract) http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/001138.html (note: the job itself is filled, the contract spot it mentions needs to be filled in february) All are in silicon valley, all are being actively interviewed. All have to be willing to put up with, well, me hanging around and asking weird questions and stuff. Just so you're warned upfront...

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How to change that unsubscriptions also require confirmation
by Somuchfun 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

Hello, Due to current legislation we need to change mailman to also require confirmation for unsubscribe requests. Does anyone know how? Thanks!

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Mailman unsubscribe mechanism unclear
by Somuchfun 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

Hello, Can someone explain the exact mechanism mailman uses for unsubscriptions? I see some of them are done without a confirmation and some members get an email with a token asked to return it to confirm their unsubscription. I have played around with mailman but are not able to figure out how it determines when a confirmation is needed and when not. Hostile unsubscriptions are a growing problem and I would need a way to make sure all unsubscriptions need to be confirmed. Thanks as always for the great help!

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Any SQL people going to Barry's sprint?
by Kevin McCann 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

A while ago Barry posted a message about a Mailman 3 sprint which is to occur in March. I was wondering if any SQL (especially MySQL) people are planning to go. If you have strong Python and MySQL skills, please drop me a note. I'm trying to identify a candidate from among a few organizations I'm working with on a project that will use an OS MLM (most likely Mailman), but I'm willing to look elsewhere if there is nobody suitable from that pool. Bottom line, I'm willing to pay to make Mailman SQL-able (as a choice) for all three data sources (list config, members, message archives). Barry, what's the word? Have any SQL folks contacted you? - Kevin

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my 2cts on Personalization, AOL, performance
by Ricardo 30 Jan '04

30 Jan '04

Hi, A few things I wanted to respond to. First of all, I agree that personalization is an important feature for certain lists. Especially if your target audience isn't the average computer geek. I need it for two reasons: easy unsubscription and bulletproof bounce detection (or better: reported-as-spam-by-AOL-user-detection). One could argue that users need to be educated better, but sometimes that's almost like striving for world peace. I can agree that mailman might be too slow for huge personalized lists, but my lists aren't bigger than 3k users... I have been running mailman for many years now. In the beginning it was running on an ancient Pentium 75 machine, so performance was a big issue for me (I couldn't even approve more than 5 posts at a time or else the system could crash ;) ) but now I have a 2Ghz machine with fast disks at my disposal so mailman won't have any trouble sending out those 3000 messages... Speaking of personalization: what is the main reason it hasn't been implemented for digests yet? Simply a lack of time or are there some important design issues which make it difficult? If isn't too difficult I could try to invest some time it myself to try to get it to work (I'm not a python god, but I can manage) about improving delivery speed: what about implementing LMTP? (http://www.networksorcery.com/enp/rfc/rfc2033.txt) Regards, Ricardo.

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