Mailman-Developers May 2008

mailman-developers@python.org

12 participants
15 discussions

before next release: disable backscatter in default installation
by Jo Rhett 07 Nov '22

07 Nov '22

Hi. There's a fairly simple problem here that needs to be addressed. And it's mostly a documentation/install problem. I'm hoping we can get this resolved before the next release. PROBLEM: Mailman comes out of the box ready to backscatter spam people. Yes, it's easy enough to fix. But because it comes stock this way, and is documented to install this way, most people install it to do this. Those of us who work in abuse departments are tired of hearing "well that's how Mailman works". We also object to having to teach people how to fix their mailman installations because it's not documented in the current manual. This is *exactly* like Sendmail 14 years ago. We didn't accept it then, and Sendmail fixed the problem. RESOLUTION: Mailman default installation should not backscatter in a default configuration. 1. Don't create backscatter aliases for subscribe/unsubscribe/etc by default. Nearly everyone uses web based signup. 2. Discard or hold messages from non-subscribers by default. I would think that it would be perfectly reasonable to have documentation on how to enable the 1980s-style -request / -subscribe etc aliases. However this documentation should have a note that this is against the AUP of nearly every network provider, and enabling it will likely cause them to get listed in various blacklists as a backscatter source. FYI: I know that this goes against the instincts of many old-time mailing list advocates here. But after dealing with a 10k/hour backscatter DoS my tolerance for this problem is understandably limited. Yes, it was a sweet day back in the 1980s. I was running a mailing list server and several UUCP gateways at the time, so I remember them well. But those days are past, and we need to deal with the reality of today. -- Jo Rhett Net Consonance : consonant endings by net philanthropy, open source and other randomness

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GNU Mailman Site Redesign
by Satoshi Tanabe 23 Jul '08

23 Jul '08

Hello, Currently I'm creating an unofficial site of GNU Mailman. It's not done yet, but the goal is to make the current official site more accessible and usable. The content is almost the same. The unofficial site (since Google Page Creator doesn't support folders, images are not shown and linked docs are not available): http://gnu.mailman.googlepages.com/index.html You can download the source tarball here (with linked docs): Source Tarball (size: 1.1mb) http://gnu.mailman.googlepages.com/Mailman-Site-Redesign.tar.gz This site tries to solve the problems that I listed in the following document: What's wrong with the current Mailman official site? http://gnu.mailman.googlepages.com/wrong.txt I'd love to have your feedback. Also, I listed several questions in the document above, so I'd appreciate if any of you could answer or comment on them (Some questions are not about the official site per se). Best, - Satoshi

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] Encrypted mailing lists
by Barry Warsaw 03 Jul '08

03 Jul '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I'm moving this discussion to mailman-developers. On Mar 30, 2008, at 2:39 PM, Alster wrote: > > I have been repeatedly tempted to sum up options of setting up > encrypted > mailing lists, with or without using GNU Mailman. > > As such, only these options listed in my previous summary remain: > > * mailman-ssls, a Mailman-Patch which has recently been updated for > Mailman 2.1.9 compatibility: > http://non-gnu.uvt.nl/mailman-ssls/ > > * firma, a standalone encrypted mailinglist server (written in bash): > http://codecoop.org/projects/firma/ > > > Additionally, there are these options which had not been part of the > last overview: > > * MMReencrypt, another Mailman patch > https://sourceforge.net/projects/mmreencrypt/ > no longer maintained > > * Schleuder, a standalone 'crypto mailinglist' > http://codecoop.org/projects/schleuder/ > still maintained (according to their versioning system), but last > release dates back to 2006 I don't have time right now to look at these, however I would really like to support some form of encrypted mailing lists for Mailman 3, if not also 2.2. It isn't possible to add this feature to Mailman 2.1. If you're interested in working on this, it would be good to capture some requirements and use cases in the wiki. If you wanted to do a survey of the approaches and implementations that have gone before, that would also help. Ideally, some folks would be motivated enough to start developing some branches in Bazaar so that we can take a look, with an eye toward supporting the feature officially in a future release. Feel free to discuss further on this mailing list. - -Barry -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.8 (Darwin) iEYEARECAAYFAkf+l2EACgkQ2YZpQepbvXFFBQCdFY+07fgyROIVGUVInd1+Zhph HBkAnjuh78SV2DzvEtchN0CAFLeoXkjE =iaw1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Mailman FAQ: a call for help
by Terri Oda 27 May '08

27 May '08

Ever wanted to help out with Mailman but didn't know how? Here's your chance! I've been trying to make the wiki into the one-stop-shop for Mailman documentation, and as part of that process, I made a script that moved the Mailman FAQ entries into the wiki. http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions You'll see that there's around 200 entries in there now, organized into sections as they were originally in the FAQ Wizard: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py I need some people who've got a few minutes to help out with cleaning up the wiki FAQ entries. You don't need to know the answers -- I just need some volunteers who can fix some links and maybe do some organization. I don't need any huge time commitment, just sign up for a wiki account and do an entry or two when you've got some spare time. Most of the pages just need someone to convert the FAQ Wizard links to internal wiki links (eg: in http://wiki.list.org/x/PIA9), maybe fix some other formatting (eg: look at http://wiki.list.org/x/p4A9 and how the preformatted stuff is inexplicably in three blocks rather than one). It's an easy job, it's just that at 200 pages, I could use some help! If you have any questions or need any help getting started, please let me know! Terri

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webui templates or not?
by Frank Schubert 20 May '08

20 May '08

Hi all, the plans in http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/TemplatingNotes and http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/StyledPages sound great, but mean a lot of work. For example there is options.py with functions for rendering output named options_page and loginpage. options_page supports the old template mechanism using options.html However loginpage has hard-coded tables including "BGCOLOR" and such ugly things. I don't know if someone is still working on the new template mechanism and I couldn't find any changes on options.py either. (What I think is fundamentally necessary for a complete template mechanism.) (I looked in http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/2.2/files and http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/files) So my plan is: For a customer I want to customize more than the standard pages (for example the function loginpage from options.py). I will use the old template system (like in function options_page in options.py), using new template names like <SCRIPT>_<FUNCTION>.html As I think this is useful for others it could maybe be merged in mailman. So what do you think, is it a waste of time because code for the old template mechanism will never get merged? I'm looking forward to your suggestions. bye, Frank -- Frank Schubert Systemadministration EsPresto AG Breite Str. 30-31 10178 Berlin/Germany Tel: +49.(0)30.90 226.750 Fax: +49.(0)30.90 226.760 f.schubert(a)espresto.com HRB 77554 AG - Berlin-Charlottenburg Vorstand: Alexander Biersack, Maya Biersack, Peter Biersack Vorsitzender des Aufsichtsrats: Oli Kai Paulus

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Important Mailman 2.1.9 to 2.1.10 upgrade note.
by Mark Sapiro 18 May '08

18 May '08

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Actually, this note really applies to just restarting mailman a Mailman 2.1.9 installation, with or without upgrading to Mailman 2.1.10. But in installations that just 'run' without intervention, this restart may not occur until an upgrade. There is an error in Mailman 2.1.9. In the introduction of the backup and recovery of queue entries, we neglected to remove the backup queue entry for an unparseable message. Thus, if you sometimes receive unparseable messages which are ignored, you may have an accumulation of .bak files in qfiles/in from these messages. When you restart Mailman, these will all be reprocessed, resulting in a flood of error log entries. There is no real harm done, but it would be a good idea when upgrading to stop Mailman and remove any qfiles/in/*.bak files. - -- Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (MingW32) iD8DBQFIDgCwVVuXXpU7hpMRAlOyAJ4/VpFnCL9JHoEBSl4PmZIBowTbigCgjjRr Bh8FoeuGZDAXonphAnvqwMA= =qt1K -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Intern
by Ian Eiloart 18 May '08

18 May '08

Hi, I have an intern coming to work for a couple of months in the summer. Neither of us will be python experts, but part of the point is to learn, right? I'd like him to work on some aspects of Mailman 3. I plan to get LMTP working to my taste, by (a) rejecting messages for non-existent lists at RCTP time, and (b) rejecting messages from unwanted sender addresses at RCPT time. I Think (a) will be easy to achieve, and (b) only slightly more challenging. So, I'm after ideas for what to do next. I'm vaguely thinking about (c) integration (which will probably begin from working up a specification for exactly what that means), and possibly (d) user interface design for end users and list admins. Any suggestions for (c) and (d) or alternative areas that need some focus would be useful. Also, can you give me pointers to a good place to learn about doctest, please? Finally, is there any overview documentation for developers new to the Mailman architecture? -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex x3148

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What do I need to do to add a package dependency in MM2.2?
by mk2s＠digitalcommute.com 18 May '08

18 May '08

I'm doing some work in mm2.2 and wanted to add some python package dependencies like routes, lxml, and simplejason. How do I go about declaring these dependencies so that the dependent packages will be installed for the end user who wants to run mm2.2? Can someone point me in the direction of the stuff that I need to read? ....maki.... ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Using REST Interface and WADL
by mk2s＠digitalcommute.com 18 May '08

18 May '08

Quoting Barry Warsaw <barry(a)list.org>: > On Apr 13, 2008, at 5:35 PM, Maki Kato wrote: [stuff deleted] >> - Documentation. I'm hoping the xHTML representation will have >> a way of being able to serve reasonable documentation. So one >> could point their browser to the REST interface and start browsing >> to learn how the server is implemented. We may want to distribute >> a static set of HTML pages that has documentation and test(dummy) >> data. > > Leonard Richardson is very hot on WADL. Will we be able to generate > that automatically or does that not have a place in the architecture > you're thinking about? I went to read up some more on WADL and ran into this: http://bitworking.org/news/193/Do-we-need-WADL I don't have any plans(yet) on auto generating the WADL, or did you mean auto generating the documentation from the WADL file? Are there tools that do that? I didn't find any such. Currently I'm returning human readable text containing something like documentation when you request the xHTML representation. I've seen this done before and figured it was a pretty good idea. It is of no use of course if you want to auto generate a client, as you would from a description file. Anyone else have any opinions or experiences with WADL? ....maki.... ---------------------------------------------------------------- This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program.

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Copy of Spertus dynamic-list patch
by A.M. Kuchling 14 May '08

14 May '08

For work I'm taking a look at Ellen Spertus's dynamic sublist patches. I've taken the patch from http://sourceforge.net/projects/dsub/, removed some extraneous stuff (like the diffs for the configure script) and added a few notes on what the patch does. The modified patch is at http://www.amk.ca/files/mailman/spertus-mailman-patch.txt --amk

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Mailman-Developers May 2008