Mailman-Developers November 2010

mailman-developers@python.org

6 participants
4 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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Errors installing Mailman 3.0
by Jessy Kate 22 Nov '10

22 Nov '10

Hi All, I'm trying to get mailman 3.0 installed in a fresh virtualenv with python 2.6 on ubuntu 10.04. I've sent messages in the irc channel a few times, but no response there. Is the channel still an active place to get help? I've stumbled my way successfully through a few errors, but need some help now. I've been following the instructions at: http://packages.python.org/mailman/docs/START.html And using the package at http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mailman/3.0.0a6 After running bootstrap.py, when i run bin/buildout, i get the following buildout errors:: Develop: '/home/jessy/src/mailman/mailman-3.0.0a6/.' While: Installing. Getting section docs. Initializing part docs. Error: Missing option: buildout:find-links And then: > > Develop: '/home/jessy/src/mailman/mailman-3.0.0a6/.' While: Installing. Getting section docs. Initializing part docs. Error: Missing option: buildout:allow-hosts Both of these were fixed by adding them as empty variables to my buildout.cfg: find-links = allow-hosts = I then get two zc.buildout recipe errors-- specifically for z3c.recipe.sphinxdoc, and z3c.recipe.filetemplate. Installed those using pip, and kept going. But now I get: (mailman)1219 jessy@moltencore:~/src/mailman/mailman-3.0.0a6$ bin/buildout Develop: '/home/jessy/src/mailman/mailman-3.0.0a6/.' While: Installing. Getting section filetemplates. Initializing part filetemplates. An internal error occured due to a bug in either zc.buildout or in a recipe being used: Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/zc/buildout/buildout.py", line 1660, in main getattr(buildout, command)(args) File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/zc/buildout/buildout.py", line 416, in install [self[part]['recipe'] for part in install_parts] File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/zc/buildout/buildout.py", line 964, in __getitem__ options._initialize() File "/usr/lib/python2.6/dist-packages/zc/buildout/buildout.py", line 1051, in _initialize self.recipe = recipe_class(buildout, name, self) File "/development/virtualenv/mailman/lib/python2.6/site-packages/z3c/recipe/filetemplate/__init__.py", line 63, in __init__ orig_distributions, ws = eggs.working_set() File "/development/virtualenv/mailman/lib/python2.6/site-packages/zc.recipe.egg-1.3.2-py2.6.egg/zc/recipe/egg/egg.py", line 101, in working_set **kw) TypeError: install() got an unexpected keyword argument 'include_site_packages' Not sure if may this has to do with the buildout.cfg variables I added. Anyway, help/advice on how to move forward would be much appreciated. Thank you! Jessy -- Jessy Cowan-Sharp http://jessykate.com

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Hi everybody
by ruizhe zhao 18 Nov '10

18 Nov '10

Hi everybody, I'm Chinese. My company use mailman to manage the maillist, and I was hired last week for matain the mailman. At yesterday, I found a problem, when the maillist manager get a message(mail) that is to notify the manager a pending mail need to confirm, and then open the second attachment and reply it. If some email client encode the first plain/text content of the manager's confirmation mail to base64, and then the confirmation will be failed. Is this a problem? Any echo is appreciated. So sorry for my poor english.

2 1

Can i use the Bouncer API a Programm wich is not GPL?
by Marc Egli 06 Nov '10

06 Nov '10

We are building a newsletter application for the django framework. For bounce detection we want to use the Mailman bouncerAPI because reimplementing would be a bad idea. Now my question is: can i release my application under a less restrictive license like the bsd license? I don't distribute Mailman i only list it as a requirement in setup.py According to the gpl-faq this is a borderline case because i only invoke a function and wait for the response. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NFUseGPLPlugins Is it possible to use Mailman like this? Is this the intended use of the BouncerAPI? Marc

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Mailman-Developers November 2010