Mailman-Developers July 2009

mailman-developers@python.org

8 participants
9 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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Merge requests
by Ryan Jud Hughes 30 Jul '09

30 Jul '09

Hi. I have done some mailman development for one of our customers. I developed four separate features. I'd like to send these features back upstream, and hopefully get them merged into the code base. I'm told that submitting bzr merge requests is the right way to do this. However, I'm new to bzr, so I'm not really sure how to do this. I'm familiar with git, but I don't think that git has this "merge request" feature. I've got the features separated into four bzr branches based off of 2.1. What do I do next? bzr send? It said there wasn't a mailto address listed. Should I bzr send -o to a file and then upload that file somewhere? Should I register a new branch in launchpad and then push my stuff there? The box with my bzr branches is behind a nat -- is that going to be a problem? If someone could point me to a FAQ or a document about submitting these things through launchpad, that would be great. Thanks. --Ryan

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Merge request
by Florian Wagner 21 Jul '09

21 Jul '09

Hello, a few weeks ago I submitted a merge request through launchpad for a small set of changes I've made to Mailman (see [1]). So far there has been no reaction at all. Is there reason for this? Are patches to this list preferred? Regards Florian Wagner [1] https://code.launchpad.net/~wagnerflo/mailman/2.1-postfix-transport/+merge/…

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Launchpad is Open Source
by Barry Warsaw 21 Jul '09

21 Jul '09

Sometimes, insomnia has its reward: http://www.ubuntu.com/news/canonical-open-sources-launchpad/ Yes, the entire platform, the whole kit-and-kaboodle. Licensed under the AGPLv3. https://dev.launchpad.net/Getting It's nice both to be hosting our GNU project on open source, and personally to be working full time on pure open source software. Note too the fact that Mailman runs Launchpad's mailing lists (no big surprise there) and if anybody has interest in discussing how this actually happens, we can do that here or in the various Launchpad forums. Enjoy, -Barry

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Last 30 days archive
by Ryan Jud Hughes 17 Jul '09

17 Jul '09

Hi. I was doing some work for people that wanted a new mailman archive feature. In addition to the different archives for the months, they wanted one that showed all mail traffic for the last 30 days -- whether or not that happened to correspond to month boundaries. I made a patch against 2.1.12 and posted it on this bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/400422 I hope somebody can take a look at it. Incoming mail gets sent to the "last30" archive as well as whichever one it's supposed to go to. It also works with bin/arch --wipe. I also created a new command-line option for the arch program. You can do bin/arch --last30 listname, and it will go through the last-30-days archive and remove the mails that are older than 30 days, and rebuild the indexes and prev/next. So, tell me what you think. Thanks. --Ryan

1 0

Templates and CSS for Mailman
by Ryan Jud Hughes 15 Jul '09

15 Jul '09

Hi. I've heard people make some noises about wanting better CSS control of their mailman sites. I've also wanted better template control -- currently, a lot of the cgi scripts create html in a hard-coded fashion. I just posted a bug report that contains a patch that I've been working on to address these issues. Most of the cgi is now created by preparing a dictionary with the strings, and running it through the template system. The archives, too. There are a small number of template files to edit -- such as page.html -- that will end up putting your theme on all the pages. I also created mailman.css, with default css to keep the current mailman look, and an empty site.css that can be tailored to your site. I created bug #39830 (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/398030) with my patch in it. Could somebody please take a look at it and tell me what you think? Thanks. --Ryan

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] [Mailman-Users] Rewriting or identifying late bounces
by Barry Warsaw 09 Jul '09

09 Jul '09

[Adding mailman-developers] On Jul 9, 2009, at 10:22 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > Stefan Förster wrote: >> >> BTW - will MM3 be able to utilize the VERP features offered by many >> modern MTAs? > > > There are patches for Postfix which can probably be adapted for other > MTAs. See the thread "Patch for use of Postfix VERP support" > starting at > <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2009-January/064588.html > >. > > This seems to be a good idea for future Mailman. I don't know if > Barry has > thought about it for MM3, but I will look at it for 2.2. I have, and it doesn't look difficult to do, although I really want to rework the current delivery architecture so that it's more modular. This would also allow different lists to have different delivery mechanisms (e.g. bulk vs. individual) and should be more efficient and more extensible. VERPing is really only one half of the "personalization" or individual delivery story. Ideally it's the half that would by default always be enabled since it improves the reliability of your memberships. It's this part that would benefit greatly from adding MTA-specific support. I think Exim supports VERPing without an SMTP extension, and I get the impression it can be made to work in Sendmail too. The other half is really a "mail merge" operation, where the headers and footers (currently, but maybe someday the email body) contains placeholders that get filled in with personal information for the specific user. I'm not aware of a standard way to do this in any MTA, so I think if you want to do this kind of message body personalization, you still have to do that in Mailman. I'd like to support this better and would consider MTA-specific approaches. Mailman also supports something called "full personalization" which hacks other headers too. I put this in the category of mail merging since I'm not aware of any MTAs providing support for that either. -Barry

1 0

External Interface XMLRPC and REST
by Bibek Shrestha 03 Jul '09

03 Jul '09

Hi All, We are trying to integrate Mailman with external cms Drupal. For this we are looking for two possible interface XMLRPC and REST. Before we begin, Im just curious as to which Mailman Developers would recommend to work with and supported for a longer period? Regards -- Bibek Shrestha bibekshrestha at gmail dot com

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pre-filter for mailman
by Ulli Horlacher 02 Jul '09

02 Jul '09

Since mailman is missing some important (for me) features and I do not know python I have written a pre-filter in perl. The features are: - the admin can defines a config files : a list of allowed MIME types : weed = commercial ads footer - the mail is disassembled in its MIME parts, only allowed TEXT parts get in the reassembled mail, not allowed MIME types are substituted with a message "part XXX (MIME-type YYY) is not allowed, ignored", allowed MIME types are saved on the web server and substituted with a message "part XXX is saved at URL YYY" - missing References header are added - bad quoting (by wrong auto-wrapping of editor) is corrected - overlong lines are reformated - non-RFC Subject prefixes like "AW:" are substituted with correct "Re:" - commercial ads are deleted - full quoting at end of mail is removed -- Ullrich Horlacher Server- und Arbeitsplatzsysteme Rechenzentrum E-Mail: horlacher(a)rus.uni-stuttgart.de Universitaet Stuttgart Tel: ++49-711-685-65868 Allmandring 30 Fax: ++49-711-682357 70550 Stuttgart (Germany) WWW: http://www.rus.uni-stuttgart.de/

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Mailman-Developers July 2009