Mailman 3 April 2010 - 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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Puzzling doubled-period bug
by A.M. Kuchling April 12, 2010

April 12, 2010

I've run into a puzzling problem that I can't yet reproduce: our Mailman installation sometimes doubles periods in the HTML portion of a message, sometimes breaking a link or image as a result. Does anyone recall seeing this before? For example, here's the difference between the HTML before it's sent and after it's received: -> diff old new 60c60 < ational_Conference.gif" alt=3D"2010 National Conference" width=3D"235" = --- > ational_Conference..gif" alt=3D"2010 National Conference" width=3D"235" = 105c105 < must-attend conference. </p> --- > must-attend conference.. </p> The first hunk is a change to an IMG SRC, so it breaks the display. These are the only two changes in an HTML file that is hundreds of lines long. Not every '.' is doubled, and '.' isn't even special to quoted-printable encoding, so this is very puzzling. Does this description sound even vaguely familiar to anyone? Searches of the Launchpad bug tracker (and bugs.python.org) didn't turn up anything apparently relevant. I'll be chasing this down, since it might be a bug in Mailman, our customization of Mailman, our spam filtering, or in Python 2.5.0's email package, binascii module, or somewhere like that. (For historical reasons, we're stuck with Python 2.5.0, so possibly this is fixed in 2.5.4). --amk

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Logo contest voting is open!
by Barry Warsaw April 8, 2010

April 8, 2010

Hello everyone. Earlier this year, we announced the contest for a new GNU Mailman logo. We received over 30 entries from many talented artists, and we thank all of them for their generous contribution. The Mailman Steering Committee has narrowed the selection down to 5 finalists, and we have identified a decent free internet voting site. With that, I'd like to announce the opening of the community driven poll for the new GNU Mailman logo! Vote here: http://bit.ly/cUpAA2 The poll will remain open until Friday May 7, 2010 at 2200 UTC. Please participate by ranking the logos from most favorite (1) to least favorite (5). While the voting software will prevent double votes, I have confidence that this community will also be good citizens and play fairly. You will have to enable JavaScript to properly interact with the voting site. GNU Mailman is free software so of course you may forward this announcement to other interested mailing lists. We invite anyone in the free software and open source communities to participate in the vote. Thanks again to all of our great artists, and to you for your continued support. If you have any questions, please do ask. Cheers, -Barry (on behalf of the GNU Mailman Steering Committee)

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MM feature request - spread out the pain
by skip＠pobox.com April 6, 2010

April 6, 2010

Perhaps this is on the feature request list already, or better yet, Barry borrowed Guido's time machine when I wasn't looking, however... I help administer a number of python.org mailing lists. MM sends out subscription reminders on the first of each month. This inevitably leads to a huge number of mail bounces many of which MM doesn't understand. The python.org postmaster folk then get to go in and manually remove a ton of email addresses. (Looks like about 100 this month. I'm sure other sites have to handle many more such bounces.) I don't know how to automate this. The best thing I can think of to do is to write an Emacs macro which copies a highlighted email address, pops over to a shell mode window ssh'd into mail.python.org and runs remove_members with the given address. That's still more manual than I would like, but given the variability in bounce formats that seems about as good as I can do without expending a lot of effort. I realize that getting Mailman to grok more rejection notice formats is a worthwhile goal, however I think it would also be helpful to spread the pain of invalid email addresses more evenly through the month, at least across mailing lists but ideally within mailing lists. Notification day for any given email might be ord(email[0]) % 28 + 1 This would be close enough for gummint work (the 29th, 30th and 31st would be declared to be postmaster holidays). -- Skip Montanaro - skip(a)pobox.com - http://www.smontanaro.net/

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MM3 WUI :: Memberships Management
by Adam McGreggor April 3, 2010

April 3, 2010

Hiya, I've had a search through the Wiki, and can't see an answer to this, and don't recall anything in the archive/can't get the right search terms. I'm wondering if with MM3, admins will be able to delegate the various aspects of admin-tasks to owners/other users -- e.g., I want to be able to allow person X to just be able to add/remove users from a given list; I want to allow person Y to be able to change archiving policies for list B. Is that something that's in the pipeline, already? If not, could it be? (my python really is quite terrible.) -- ``What lawyers call intellectual property is no more than theft from the public domain.'' (Andy Mueller-Maguhn)

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Add mail to database
by Илья Чистяков April 1, 2010

April 1, 2010

Hello I want to store mails in database, so, can you explain in what module emails are filtered? After that I can implement my "add-mail-to-database" function. For example, then unregistred user send a message. Sincerely, Elias.

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