Mailman 3 October 2010 - Mailman-Developers

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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Archives! Two neat demos from my GSoC students
by Terri Oda 27 Oct '10

27 Oct '10

As some of you may know, Mailman had a bunch of Google Summer of Code students working on our codebase via Systers, which hired students to do improvements on their Mailman-based list infrastructure. I was mentoring for the project which worked on the archives, where we had two students, Yian Shang who worked on the web interface for the archives, and Priya Iyer who worked on integrating search. They've produced some great demos that you all need to see, and some code that I'd really like to see integrated into Mailman 3. I was going to forward their final summaries to the lists, but since they're quite long, here's the things I'd like you all to check out first and foremost. There's two neat demos here! #1: Yian's been working on a variety of UI infrastructure improvements (note that in this case, she's working at the code to support the UI, not the graphics and theming, so this may not *look* fancy but it *behaves* really well) Her threaded conversation demo is here: http://dev.systers.org/pipermail/testing/all/conversation-3.html and note that you can actually click through and read messages there, so try poking around those archives and see how you like them! And you might be interested in hearing about the use cases that went into threading and quote detection that made that demo possible. Many of you may have answered the surveys I sent out on her behalf which were used to generate these use cases! She's got a whole series of posts on it, but here's one of interest: http://movicont.nfshost.com/blog/mailman-archives-ui-added-automatically-de… #2: Priya's search demo is here: http://lists.priyakuber.in/cgi-bin/mailman/mailocate/search.py She'd originally hoped to find and integrate an existing search package, but licensing proved to be an issue for upstream contribution, so she wound up implementing her own. You can search a string, a phrase, wildcard searches with *, by author, by subject, and using some basic operators (AND OR NOT all work). It's got a basic spell check, though she expects that will need to be improved. The documentation is here: http://systers.org/systers-dev/doku.php/doumentation-priya And the code is here: http://github.com/beachbrake/Mailocate/tree/master/demo/ ----- I've cc'ed mailman-users on this email since many people there contributed to the surveys we used to develop use-cases, but follow-ups should probably go to mailman-developers! Terri

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Help with mailman 3, attempting to build branch
by Simon Fraser 27 Oct '10

27 Oct '10

Hi, This is a newbie question, I realise, but I'm trying to get a branch of mailman 3 working, so that I can add in some support for LDAP/mailAlternateAddress lookups, which I know will be useful for our site, and hopefully useful for others. I've worked through the bzr install[0] and finally have my own separate install of Python 2.7 with bzr2.3, just for mailman. However, 2.7 doesn't appear to work - should I be using Python 2.6 instead? Is there a way to get it working with 2.7? [1] Incidentally, are there plans to allow installs to a different location? If you specify a prefix to install under, it checks for the presence of the Python site-packages and fails if they're not present. Is it going to be a requirement to install under the Python tree, or is this just for development? Thanks, Simon. [0] Debian/lenny has Python 2.5, which is too old. It does have bzr 2.0, which is apparently recent enough, however each installation of Python expects bzr to be in the same bin/ directory as the python binary, so one must build bzr independantly for each Python install. This isn't very intuitive for someone new to this tool. [1] "python-2.7 setup.py build" produces: Traceback (most recent call last): File "setup.py", line 112, in <module> docs=['Sphinx', 'z3c.recipe.sphinxdoc'], <... whole lot of lines about run_command...> File "/$PYTHON_HOME/lib/python2.7/site-packages/setuptools_bzr-2.0-py2.7.egg/setuptools_bzr/__init__.py", line 50, in bzrlib_get_children inv = branch.repository.get_revision_inventory(branch.last_revision()) AttributeError: 'CHKInventoryRepository' object has no attribute 'get_revision_inventory' -- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.

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styiling the archive
by Federico Vezzoli 01 Oct '10

01 Oct '10

I'm already a user of mailman and it works pretty good. A client asked me if it's possible to have the archive online and to integrate it in his website. So my question is: "Is possible to add some markup and css to the mailing archive to make it pretty to integrate with the website?" thanks.

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