Mailman 3 February 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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New Logo Contest for 2010
by Barry Warsaw 02 Mar '10

02 Mar '10

Hello everybody! Our current GNU Mailman logos were designed by the Dragon De Monsyne many years ago. They have served us exceedingly well, but with the coming of Mailman 3, we've decided it's time our logos got a face lift. So we're opening up a new logo contest to the Mailman and GNU communities. We invite your creative and inspiring designs! Details of the contest and submission guidelines are available here: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/NewLogo Submissions will be open until February 28, 2010, and is open to everyone, so feel free to forward this announcement. Please contact the Mailman Steering Committee at mailman-cabal(a)python.org with any questions. Enjoy, -Barry

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Feature Request - Interactive HTML Digests
by Tanstaafl 25 Feb '10

25 Feb '10

Hi guys, I'm really excited about the developments ongoing with MM3... :) One thing I'd really like to see in MM3 with respect to list digests is what I'll call 'Interactive HTML Digests'. Yahoo 'full featured' digests go about halfway to where I'd like to see MM3 go. This was discussed briefly on the users list in the thread 'Replying to digests' on 12/29... Here's what I'm imagining: 1. Each message subject in the summary of messages at the top of the digest are embedded hyperlinks that if clicked, will scroll the digest down to that message (Yahoos do this now), 2. Each message displayed in the digest body would have the following in a single line at the very bottom *and* top of each message (Yahoos are only at the bottom): a) separate button/links for: 'Reply to Sender', 'Reply to List' and maybe 'Reply to all' (that last one could be optional?), and b) little 'Back to top' links to scroll back to the top of the message summary 3. When replying to a message, preserve the message subject *and* all of the individual message references so that replying to messages from the HTML digests doesn't break threading - basically so it looks as if it was replied to individually and separately, not from the list digest. Apparently Yahoo's doesn't preserve the message header/references (bad), but it does preserve the subject. Also - I use Thunderbird, and when I click Yahoos 'Reply to Group', it does 2 things wrong, but I don't know if MM could do anything about this or if it would be a Thunderbird issue: 1) it uses the email clients 'default account' instead of the account the user is in - so, if you just type something and click 'Send', it is sent from the wrong account and will bounce since the email address for that account is not a list/group member, and 2) Thunderbird's new 'Quote only selected text' doesn't work - in fact, *nothing* is quoted. This issue is not as big as the first one, since it can be worked around by simply copying the highlighted text (more often than not I select text to quote rather than quoting the whole thing) then 'pasting as quote'. Two more steps - not that big a deal, but hey, if it can be coded to use the Clients features, all the better. Since I'm not a programmer, all I can do is offer to help test/debug and document this feature should you guys see any value in implementing it. Thanks for listening... :)

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Html headers & footers, unsubscribe
by Mark Sapiro 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

Tom Gafford wrote: >With reference to: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2005-February/017850.ht… > >It doesn't appear that Adrian bye's fix ever made it into the Mailman code base, and now the links to the patch are broken. The sourceforge link in the above message is still good if you join the two lines back together. >Does anyone know where to find his patches and whether they work on any newer version of mailman? Or if there is any other fix to this problem? The patches are still on sourceforge. They probably work as well in current Mailman 2.1.13 as they did in 2.1.5. -- 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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Html headers & footers, unsubscribe
by Tom Gafford 24 Feb '10

24 Feb '10

With reference to: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2005-February/017850.ht… It doesn't appear that Adrian bye's fix ever made it into the Mailman code base, and now the links to the patch are broken. Does anyone know where to find his patches and whether they work on any newer version of mailman? Or if there is any other fix to this problem?

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman/Forge Integration
by Barry Warsaw 23 Feb '10

23 Feb '10

On Feb 11, 2010, at 04:48 PM, christian.bayle(a)orange-ftgroup.com wrote: >We (Coclico-project http://www.coclico-project.org/) have started some >work on a better integration of mailman and forges Hi Christian, This is really interesting work from a number of perspectives. You might be aware that my day job is working on Launchpad <http://launchpad.net> which is a Zope-based open source (AGPL) software hosting service developed by Canonical for development of Ubuntu. As part of that work, I integrated Mailman 2.x with Launchpad, and of course all of that code has been released as part of Launchpad. We did not override Security Manager, since we expose a much simpler (some bug reporters would say *too* simple ;) admin interface to Mailman through the Launchpad web ui. We actually don't expose the Mailman web ui at all. If you're interested in more information about what we did, I'd be happy to provide it. (As an aside, I wonder if it would be interesting to find ways for Launchpad to exchange information with the forges?) Your patches are to Mailman 2.1, but that version is in maintenance-only mode, so we wouldn't be able to apply them to upstream. Our focus is on Mailman 3 and I would be really interested in any feedback and experience you might have integrating that version with the forges. >I know there is also some work made to integrate mailman and forge >forums, we would like to deal with too. I'm very interested in this work too. >Our next step is to make mailman a forge plugin to demonstrate how it >could make easier to use mailing lists in forges. I intend to work on integrating Mailman 3 with Launchpad sometime in the next six months or so (I'm temporarily working on a different project at Canonical). I suspect that the work to do this will have some overlap with your work. -Barry

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Auto-reject
by Jonathan Knight 23 Feb '10

23 Feb '10

We've been using mailman for a number of years and are very happy with it, especially the integration that's possible with Exim. However - I've recently met a problem that seems to be a common theme in the mailing lists but without an accepted solution so I thought I just check with the experts. We wish to have a size limit applied to any message sent to our mailing lists. This is going to be determined by our mailing lists administrators. The problem is that the administrators do not want the moderators to be able to override that limit. As far as I can tell, whatever limits the administrators set will only cause the message to be sent to the moderators, who can then override the wishes of the administrators and send out the message anyway. Our administrators are technical and will set limits based on what our servers are able to handle. The moderators will be communications experts who can assess the quality of the message but are not technical. I supose what I'm looking for is the auto-reject facility for an exceeded message size and I notice the same request scattered through the mail archives. I wonder whether there is an accepted solution for doing this? Jon

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adding new features for site admin (webUI)
by Kovács Zoltán 22 Feb '10

22 Feb '10

Dear Developers, My task is to enhance the web admin interface for mailman-2.1.x, requested by one of my customers. As a programmer, I learned that I need to add some lines of code into Mailman/Cgi/admin.py (or listinfo.py). I also learned that there are upcoming versions (2.2 and 3.0) which may have a different (completely rewritten) interface. As far as I can understand the current version (2.1.x) can be a widely used one for several years, so my changes will be fruitful for the community for a few years or so. I'd like to add the following new features. My customer is running 100+ different lists with 500+ users. So my customer asks me to give a web interface for the following: * Remove a given user from all lists. If a user to be removed is a list admin, then a warning should come instead. * Change the email address of a given user in all lists. I know that these requests could be done via the command line interface, but my customer would like to maintain these task via web. My questions to you are: * If my code is of quality, will it be a part of the mainstream code (from 2.1.14 or so)? * Is admin.py the right place for such an enhancement? Thank you for your answer in advance. Yours, Zoltan Kovacs http://particio.com/english/

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Where to make feature requests for MM3?
by Tanstaafl 22 Feb '10

22 Feb '10

Is this the place, or is there a bug-tracker that would be the preferred medium? Thanks...

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Sprinting at Pycon
by Barry Warsaw 22 Feb '10

22 Feb '10

Hi folks. Just a quick note that we're sprinting at Pycon now. If you'd like to participate virtually, we're on IRC at #mailman on freenode. Please ping us to join in! -Barry

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