Mailman 3 July 2008 - Mailman-Developers

before next release: disable backscatter in default installation
by Jo Rhett Nov. 7, 2022

Nov. 7, 2022

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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Re: [Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] moderation rejection notices, etc.
by Mark Sapiro July 26, 2008

July 26, 2008

Michael Welch wrote: > > 2. When I reject a moderated message with an explanation, the > rejection note comes from listname-bounces@ . So when the member > replies to that message, it sends me a note saying that it received > an unrecognized bounce, and buried in the note is the member's > response. > > Shouldn't rejected & annotated messages come from listname-admin@ > instead? I bet there is a good reason for this that I do not know. Brad has already responded to 1., 3. and 4. As far as 2. is concerned, you raise a good point, although you mean the messages should be From: listname-owner@.... listname-admin@... is actually a deprecated synonym for listname-bounces@... I don't think there is a good reason for the reject to come from listname-bounces@.... This came about in the implementation of automated bounce processing in Mailman 2.1. Prior to 2.1, the list owner address was listname-admin@.... This address was also used as the envelope sender of messages so bounces would return to the list owner for attention. With automated bounce processing, the envelope sender was changed to listname-bounces@..., and the listname-admin@..., was deprecated in favor of listname-owner@... and processed the same as listname-bounces@.... At that point, the processing of refusal messages was changed. The intent was that replies go to the owner. In fact the log message for the change says __refuse(): In the refuse.txt, use the -owner address as the %(adminaddr)s expansion so that when the human acts on this message, they'll contact a human without going through the bounce processor. The actual change <http://mailman.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/mailman?view=rev&revision=5019> changed the address inserted into the text of the refusal to the listname-owner@... address, but it changed the From: to the listname-bounces@... address. I think this was a mistake. I'm Ccing mailman-developers in case someone remembers some reason for this, but barring objection, I'll change it for the next release. -- Mark Sapiro <mark(a)msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan

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incorrect Catalan translation
by Carles Pina i Estany July 26, 2008

July 26, 2008

Hello, I've sent a patch in Sourceforge for the Catalan translation: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=2028370&group_id=… In the webpage was said to send there and send ping here, so this is what I'm doing. Thank you, -- Carles Pina i Estany GPG id: 0x8CBDAE64 http://pinux.info Manresa - Barcelona

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GNU Mailman Site Redesign
by Satoshi Tanabe July 23, 2008

July 23, 2008

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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rss feed
by Patrick Stinson July 23, 2008

July 23, 2008

Has there been any work on generating an rss feed from a mailman archive? I got the HyperArchive.py patch to work but the body comes out wrong. The perl scraper seems to have slightly better output but generates some ugly html escaping. The goal is to generate a blog-like activity summary using the tite, author, date, and body of each mail sent to the list and slap it on the main page. Some nice markup would be useful as well. The site is here: http://www.onlyinalaska.org/

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New unofficial LMTP branch
by William Mead July 22, 2008

July 22, 2008

Hi, A new Mailman 3 branch can now be found at https://code.launchpad.net/~wilunix/mailman/lmtp The wiki at http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/MailmanBranches has been updated with this branch in the unofficial section. This branch has enhanced LMTP code for Mailman, found in mailman/queue/lmtp.py. The LMTP server will reject mail RCPT TO if: (a) the list doesn't exist, or (b) generic_nonmember_action is set to "reject", and the sender is not a list member. Emails to sub-addresses of known lists will pass this point. This code still needs enhancing. We would like your views on how emails should be processed, depending on the sender's status (member/non-member), the sub-address in the list address and the non-member filters. Depending on which sub-addresses are used and if the sender is a known member or not, emails should be accepted or rejected at RCPT TO. Should emails from unknown senders with the sub-addresses -leave and -unsubscribe not pass RCPT TO, seeing as these senders aren't members of any lists ? Should emails from unknown senders with the sub-addresses -join and -subscribe be able to pass RCPT TO so that people can join and subscribe to mailing lists ? What should be done with emails from unknown senders with the sub-addresses -bounces, -owner, -confirm and -request ? Should all the sub-addresses be accessible by all known members ? At the moment our code will reject mail from senders who aren't members if generic_nonmember_action is set to "reject". Seeing as this code is enhancing the LMTP server how should we handle the non-member filters ? Should we keep the current filters ? or would a new mechanism for handling emails from non members be the best solution ? William Mead.

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Mailman 3.0 config_list
by Ian Eiloart July 18, 2008

July 18, 2008

Hi, It looks like config_list isn't working yet in Mailman 3.0, and there seems to be quite a lot of work to do to get it working. In the meantime, how can I configure accept_these_nonmembers for a list? I need to test LMTP qrunner code that uses this value. I can do an SQL update, which is probably the easiest way to create a value, but I'm not sure what the value of the field should be. -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex x3148

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bug report
by Ian Eiloart July 9, 2008

July 9, 2008

Hi, I'm trying to work out how to report a bug in Mailman 3.0 None seem to be listed at <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman> The bug seems to be in the lmtp queue runner. If I try to create a new list while the queue runner is handling a connection, mailman.db gets permanently locked. So, if I telnet to the lmtp server, and say: 220 quant.staff.uscs.susx.ac.uk Python LMTP queue runner 1.0 lhlo me 250 quant.staff.uscs.susx.ac.uk mail from:<> 250 Ok rcpt to:<foo(a)example.com> then, I switch to another shell, and try to create a list with create_list: quant:mailman-3.0.0a1 its$ staging/bin/create_list -l baz(a)example.com -q -o wam221(a)sussex.ac.uk Traceback (most recent call last): File "staging/bin/create_list", line 8, in <module> load_entry_point('mailman==3.0.0a1', 'console_scripts', 'bin/create_list')() File "/Users/wam22/mailmantesting/test4/mailman-3.0.0a1/mailman/bin/create_list.py", line 110, in main config.db.commit() File "/Users/wam22/mailmantesting/test4/mailman-3.0.0a1/mailman/database/__init__.py", line 79, in commit self.store.commit() File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/storm-0.12-py2.5.egg/storm/store.py", line 107, in commit self._connection.commit() File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/storm-0.12-py2.5.egg/storm/databases/sqlite.py", line 125, in commit self.raw_execute("COMMIT", _end=True) File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/storm-0.12-py2.5.egg/storm/databases/sqlite.py", line 153, in raw_execute return Connection.raw_execute(self, statement, params) File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/storm-0.12-py2.5.egg/storm/database.py", line 278, in raw_execute raw_cursor.execute(statement) sqlite3.OperationalError: database is locked And, it stays locked like that for eternity, or until I remove var/data/mailman.db-journal (whichever comes sooner ;) The question is, why would the lmtp server need a write lock on the database? -- Ian Eiloart IT Services, University of Sussex x3148

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Mailman 3 lmtp queue runners
by William Mead July 7, 2008

July 7, 2008

Hello fellow Mailman developers, My name is William Mead, I'm a new Mailman developer and currently as an intern for Ian Elioart at the university of Sussex. We have started working on Mailman 3.0. At the moment we are looking at the lmtp part of Mailman, however we have come up against a few problems. We are able to get all the queue runners started except for the lmtp queue runner. We have set lmtp to be used in the Defaults.py file, but this doesn't start the lmtp queue runner. We are currently looking at the lmtp.txt file in 3.0/Mailman/queue/docs. To start a lmtp queue runner we need to be able to run these 3 lines of code : >>> from mailman.tests import helper >>> master = helpers.TestableMaster() >>> master.start('lmtp') However the second line of code gives us an error and prevents us from starting the lmtp runner. The python code contained in this file produces errors when trying to doctest it. Once we've run the doctest : >>> import doctest >>> doctest.testfile("lmtp.txt") here is the first error : ********************************************************************** File "./lmtp.txt", line 14, in lmtp.txt Failed example: master = helpers.TestableMaster() Exception raised: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/System/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/doctest.py", line 1212, in __run File "<doctest lmtp.txt[1]>", line 1, in <module> master = helpers.TestableMaster() File "/Library/Python/2.5/site-packages/mailman-3.0.0a1_-py2.5.egg/mailman/tests/helpers.py", line 114, in __init__ restartable=False, config_file=config.filename) AttributeError: 'Configuration' object has no attribute 'filename' ********************************************************************** which correctly corresponds to the second line of code needed, we saw earlier. Do we have to import any other files or set any specific variables ? William Mead.

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updated wiki page on how to setup an environment to run the restserver
by Maki Kato July 7, 2008

July 7, 2008

Since I figured the setting up of a running dev environment is not exactly trivial, I've gone through the steps again myself and recorded them on the wiki at: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/restserver-branch ....maki....

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