Mailman 3 January 2004 - Mailman-Developers

Two requests. Hugh
by Hugh Esco 22 Jan '04

22 Jan '04

Greetings: I first started using Mailman during the 2000 campaign cycle, when the Nader campaign put it on their servers, subscribed me to a few of its lists and gave me administrative responsibilities for [ga-vols] to support my work on that campaign. I came to request a couple of additional lists from the nader2000 server administrator before November's election. Based on that experience, I then recommended it to Cameron Spitzer, administrator for the Green Internet Society, which provides a few servers at greens.org to the Green Party movement in this country and around the world. By 2001 or so, he had worked through his issues with Python and Mailman installation and left me with administrative authority over a brand new ga.greens.org/mailman installation. I now provide administartive support for close to twenty lists supporting our local affiliates, committees and candidate campaigns. We are creating additional lists all the time. I write with two specific questions today: (1) The administrative page for a list permits someone to hold the list back as private for list subscribers only, or as available to the browsing public, with anyone able to access its contents. I would love to see a bit more gradiation here. We have lists that are set up as Members only lists. Our By-laws guarantee sunshine in the operation of our Party for Party members. I would like to be able to create a Members only page, where an authenticated member would be able to review and access lists that are designated as members-only, and which would be as simple to construct as the ga.greens.org/mailman/listinfo page now is. I imagine that our local affiliates would also appreciate such a service so that we might have a ga.greens.org/mailman/members/listinfo and a ga.greens.org/mailman/members/dekalb/listinfo page as well where authenticated members of the Dekalb County affiliate might find their local -dx, -annc and various committee lists, as well as the -news list and any others that would be listed on the public site. The idea here is that we wouldn't have to go to the effort of creating another instance of the server at gagpmembers.greens.org/ or dekalb.gagpmembers.greens.org/, that we could hide internal lists from the browsing public, but not from our members and that the state Party's IT team could manage the admin details for the locals, while still providing additional organization for folks directly accessing the lists that most interest them. I would be happy to provide support with review of algorythms, testing and documentation. Don't know I could be much help with coding. I'm pretty busy as it is and have only a few thousand lines of perl, php and bash under my belt, with no python experience whatsoever. Is there any work to provide this sort of functionality already under way? Might there be any interest in undertaking such a project? (2) Between administering the ga.greens.org/mailman server itself and administering perhaps a third or more of the lists hosted there, I get plenty of email from bounced addresses. It is far more than I can keep up with. I'm looking for a script that will process an mbox of returned mail, extracting a report of what addresses bounced what subject lines from what lists on what dates and for what reasons. Such a report would permit me to quickly parse the results and send them to individual list administrators and help all of us to know which addresses to unsubscribe and which addresses to endure until their mail boxes got cleaned out and started accepting our email again. Including the subject lines would also permit us to know when an individual needed a phone call to keep them in the loop about a subject addressed in a bounced message. I have toyed with scripting this in perl, but have thought that surely I am not the first person to realize this need, that someone has to have dealt with this issue in the past and have something I can simply download and install. Any leads on something which already exists or a project already underway to develop something like this would be greatly appreciated. I look forward to hearing back from you soon on this. The 2004 election cycle is upon us and I expect my email overload to only increase as the months go by. The Mailman project has already done much to make my life easier with respect to this work load. But I'd really appreciate any leads on how to address these two issues. I just added myself to this list, on the daily digest. I would appreciate it if folks replying to this thread would cc: it directly to me, as well as responding to the list itself, to help me focus on the list traffic most pertinent to how I can get involved in supporting Mailman. Thank you all who have contributed so much to building such a great tool which has been so helpful to our work, building the Georgia Green Party. -- Hugh Esco Political Coordinator Georgia Green Party

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Option to send also list-owner/moderator comments to list-owners address.
by Andrzej Kasperowicz 21 Jan '04

21 Jan '04

I suggest to add an option in 'pending moderator requests' to send not only a copy of the message to list-owner (as it is now), but a copy of the message with list-owners/moderators comments in case the message is rejected. Regards ak

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Question about mailman performance
by Somuchfun 21 Jan '04

21 Jan '04

Whenever I have a mailing list send out 30,000 emails python takes up about 95% of cpu time and it is impossible to get into the mailman admin interface. The apache server responds just fine to other requests. Is this normal? I hope not, ;-) Any advice?

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Mixed Languages in response messages
by Michael Heydekamp 20 Jan '04

20 Jan '04

Hi, the response to the 'help' request of a subscriber delivers a German output except for the command 'confirm <confirmation-string>' which comes in English. The mailman.po file looks OK to me and compiles fine, so what can be the reason? Michael

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explaining bounce_score_threshold
by PieterB 20 Jan '04

20 Jan '04

I'm having some trouble with a bouncing e-mailadress (still investigating). I didn't really understand the bounce_score_threshold help text. Mailman 2.1.3 help text for the item is: bounce_score_threshold (bounce): The maximum member bounce score before the member's subscription is disabled. This value can be a floating point number. I think the explanation on http://www.washington.edu/computing/mailman/owners/maintenance.html is much clearer. Can the text be changed to something like: bounce_score_threshold (bounce): The maximum member bounce score before the member's subscription is disabled. Each subscriber is assigned a bounce score (floating point number) and every time Mailman encounters a bounce from this member, the score goes up. Hard bounces (meaning a fatal error) increase the score by 1, while soft bounces (meaning a temporary error occurred) increase the score by 0.5. Note that the bounce scores are only increased once per day so even if ten hard bounces are received for the same subscriber in one day, the subscriber's score will increase by only 1 for that day. PieterB -- http://zwiki.org

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[Fwd: Linux User & Developer Expo 2004 (Correction)]
by Barry Warsaw 20 Jan '04

20 Jan '04

Are any of our UK or Euro Mailman folks interested in representing the project at this expo? I won't be able to make it. -Barry

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Achieving better formatting of archives
by Chris Boulter 19 Jan '04

19 Jan '04

Hi, Has anyone encountered (or solved) these problems with Mailman's (2.1.2) list archives? I'm aware that an improved archiver is planned for MM3, so I'm just looking for workarounds. Suggestions gratefully received... 1. Attachments lose their filename extension. On my installation, files attached to emails which are not of a 'known' file extension (.txt, .html, etc) are given an extension of '.bat'. This confuses users looking at the attachment with Internet Explorer. They click the link, but their browser ignores the Content-Type header of text/plain and reports the file as an MS DOS batch file. The file renaming in the archiver seems to be intended as a security measure, but our lists have restricted membership and don't need this safeguard. I think I might have identified the relevant bit of code to change to avoid this. 2. HTML emails are not dealt with nicely in the archive. By editing ARCHIVE_HTML_SANITIZER, I can get either a plain-text inline version (by specifying a command invoking lynx) but the HTML is lost, or some variation on removing or HTML-escaping the HTML part. What I'd really like is an inline plain-text version with a link to the original HTML part (unescaped, so it'll render in the user's browser with tables/graphics/etc intact - again, ok for us due to 'trusted' subscribers) 3. Long lines in emails. No word wrapping is done on plain text emails; sensible enough in a way. However, we think most of our users will send emails with long lines. When displayed in a browser, these seem to give very long lines with a horizontal scroll bar (since the long lines are enclosed in <PRE> tags). Ideally our page would be wrapped by the browser, yet still preserve paragraph boundaries and indenting. I've failed to find an HTML way to do this. My current plan is to modify the archiving mechanism to word wrap to a fixed 80 chars, perhaps using the Unix command-line utility 'fold'. Many thanks, Chris

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Mailman Error
by Marco Antonio Reis Henriques 19 Jan '04

19 Jan '04

Hi, I just have trying to reject a message from a non-authorized user to a list that I manage and I received the error message below. How can I solve this ? Thanks in advance. Marco Bug in Mailman version 2.1 We're sorry, we hit a bug! If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what happened. Thanks! Traceback: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main main() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 184, in main process_form(mlist, doc, cgidata) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 702, in process_form forward, forwardaddr) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 178, in HandleRequest forward, addr) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 365, in __handlepost syslog('vette', note) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 40, in write self.write_ex(kind, msg, args, kws) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Syslog.py", line 58, in write_ex logf.write(msg + '\n') File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/StampedLogger.py", line 73, in write Logger.write(self, "%s %s" % (prefix, msg)) File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Logging/Logger.py", line 90, in write msg = unicode(msg, self.__encoding) UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf8' codec can't decode bytes in position 138-140: invalid data ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Python information: Variable Value sys.version 2.3 (#1, Aug 7 2003, 05:26:01) [GCC 2.95.4 20020320 [FreeBSD]] sys.executable /usr/bin/python sys.prefix /usr/local sys.exec_prefix /usr/local sys.path /usr/local sys.platform freebsd4 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- Environment variables: Variable Value force_response_1_0 1 HTTP_REFERER https://lists.teste.com/mailman/admindb/ldscc-l SSL_CIPHER_EXPORT false SERVER_SOFTWARE Apache/2.0.48 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.0.48 OpenSSL/0.9.7a SSL_VERSION_INTERFACE mod_ssl/2.0.48 SCRIPT_NAME /mailman/admindb SSL_SERVER_A_KEY rsaEncryption QUERY_STRING SERVER_SIGNATURE REQUEST_METHOD POST PATH_INFO /ldscc-l SERVER_PROTOCOL HTTP/1.1 SSL_SERVER_S_DN /CN=teste.com/OU=Trustcenter/O=TESTE/C=AU/serialNumber=xxxx SSL_CIPHER RC4-MD5 SSL_SERVER_V_START Dec 3 11:36:17 2003 GMT SSL_SESSION_ID EB076EE06FA4E53AAE4DB9FC5BBDF79E0767F11BFF432137DC936E368EBEFB85 CONTENT_LENGTH 395 SSL_CLIENT_VERIFY NONE HTTP_USER_AGENT Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1) HTTP_CONNECTION Keep-Alive HTTP_COOKIE nti-l+admin=28020000006954b60b4073280000003432633236613436313439306438636262 3235626339336162623562393463643631376439373936; ldscc-l+admin=28020000006902b80b40732800000065353063623632633561333666373435 393539346435633266356239643965386538363931653061 SERVER_NAME teste.com REMOTE_ADDR 192.168.0.5 SSL_CIPHER_ALGKEYSIZE 128 PATH_TRANSLATED /usr/local/apache/htdocs/mailman/ldscc-l SSL_SERVER_I_DN_C AU SSL_SERVER_M_VERSION 3 SSL_SERVER_I_DN_O TESTE SERVER_ADDR 192.168.0.2 DOCUMENT_ROOT /usr/local/apache/htdocs/mailman SSL_SERVER_S_DN_OU Trustcenter SERVER_PORT 443 SSL_SERVER_I_DN_Email pki(a)teste.com SSL_VERSION_LIBRARY OpenSSL/0.9.7a PYTHONPATH /usr/local/mailman SCRIPT_FILENAME /usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin/admindb SERVER_ADMIN root(a)teste.com SSL_SERVER_S_DN_O TESTE SSL_SERVER_A_SIG sha1WithRSAEncryption HTTP_HOST teste.com HTTPS on HTTP_CACHE_CONTROL no-cache SSL_SERVER_S_DN_C AU REQUEST_URI /mailman/admindb/ldscc-l HTTP_ACCEPT image/gif, image/x-xbitmap, image/jpeg, image/pjpeg, application/x-shockwave-flash, application/vnd.ms-powerpoint, application/vnd.ms-excel, application/msword, */* SSL_SERVER_M_SERIAL 0170 SSL_CIPHER_USEKEYSIZE 128 nokeepalive 1 GATEWAY_INTERFACE CGI/1.1 SSL_PROTOCOL SSLv3 REMOTE_PORT 1315 HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE us_eng HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING gzip, deflate ssl_unclean_shutdown 1 SSL_SERVER_V_END Dec 2 11:36:17 2004 GMT CONTENT_TYPE application/x-www-form-urlencoded SSL_SERVER_I_DN_CN AC TESTE SSL_SERVER_S_DN_CN teste.com downgrade_1_0 1 SSL_SERVER_I_DN /C=AU/O=TESTE/CN=AC TESTE/emailAddress=pki(a)teste.com

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Combining Archives / Deleting Archives
by S. Backman 16 Jan '04

16 Jan '04

1. What are the procedures for combining Archives - say 12 monthly archive folders into one yearly archive folder? 2. How does one eliminate old archive folders? Thanks S. Backman

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HTML and Archives
by Geoff Staples 14 Jan '04

14 Jan '04

It appears that the archives do not support HTML. Specifically, the lists can be setup to allow users to send HTML. But, the archives don't. Please verify that isn't simply a configuration issue. Also, can someone direct me to developer information about how to develop and submit code to the project? Geoff

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