Mailman 3 December 2012 - 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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RELEASED: GNU Mailman 3.0 beta 3
by Barry Warsaw 31 Dec '12

31 Dec '12

Hello friends of Mailman! I said I played this song so many times before That the melody keeps repeating Time for my usual "sneak one in before the new year" release! I'm happy to announce the third beta release of the core Mailman 3.0 engine. Mailman 3.0b3 is code named "Here Again". You can download GNU Mailman 3.0b3 from Launchpad or the Python Cheeseshop: https://launchpad.net/mailman http://pypi.python.org/pypi/mailman The GNU Mailman documentation is available online at: http://packages.python.org/mailman Alpha releases of Postorius, our new web ui are available at: https://launchpad.net/postorius http://pypi.python.org/pypi/postorius You might also like to take a look at the new archiver project called Hyperkitty: https://launchpad.net/hyperkitty GNU Mailman, Postorius, and Hyperkitty are all distributed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. Detailed changes in Mailman 3.0b3 are available here: http://tinyurl.com/adgeuwg Here's a summary of the most user and developer visible changes: * Python 2.7 is now required. Python 2.6 is no longer officially supported. * The canonical resource for a mailing list in the REST API now uses its list-id by default instead of its posting address. For backward compatibility, you can still reference a mailing list by its posting address. However the list-id is more stable since it will not change. * REST API change: The JSON representation for held messages has changed to a more flat representation. * You can now specify a list style to use when creating a mailing list through the REST API. * The `subject_prefix` attribute of mailing lists can be get/set through the REST API. Thanks to Terri Oda. * Membership change moderation (subscriptions and unsubscription requests) are available through the REST API. * `list_id` is added to the JSON representation for a mailing list. Thanks to Jimmy Bergman. * User resources are expanded in the REST API. You can change a user's display name or password, and you can now verify their password through REST by posting the plain text password and checking the HTTP response code. * Addresses can now be verified and unverified through the REST API. * Some changes have been made to the configuration file format. - [passlib]path is renamed to [passlib]configuration - [mta]configuration names a separate file to configure Postfix - The default style is now called `legacy-default`, and a `legacy-announce` style has been added. You can select the system default style through via the [styles]default configuration. * More database schema cleanups, in both the ban table and the mailinglist table. * Changes in the options for the `bin/mailman aliases` command. * Lots of other bug fixes. Enjoy, and Happy New Year, -Barry

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(no subject)
by Sandesh Agrawal 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

I have trying to inject many messages into lmtp queue using : ./bin/mailman inject abc(a)xyz.com -f message_file -q lmtp But whenever i see the number of messages using: >>> from mailman.testing.helpers import get_queue_messages >>> items = get_queue_messages('lmtp') >>> len(items) it always display 1 , and on executing : >>>print items[0].msg.as_string() only the latest message is being displayed, where are other older messages going ?

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Barry Warsaw 22 Dec '12

22 Dec '12

On Dec 22, 2012, at 01:02 PM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: >I am using python 2.7.3 and bin/py interpreter prompt to run : > >>>> master = TestableMaster() >>>> master.start() > >But the following error occurs : >-------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> > File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/testing/helpers.py", >line 186, in start > self.start_runners(runners) > File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/bin/master.py", >line 385, in start_runners > for runner_config in config.runner_configs: > File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/config/config.py", >line 215, in runner_configs > for section in self._config.getByCategory('runner', []): >AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'getByCategory' >------------------------------------------------------------------------ > >should i not use bin/py or anything else need to be done. Remember that I said bin/py is just the Python interpreter with sys.path set up correctly, but no initializations done? That's what's happening here. None of the configuration system is set up by bin/py. You want `bin/mailman shell` which will give you an interpreter prompt with all the system initializations performed. Cheers, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Sandesh Agrawal 22 Dec '12

22 Dec '12

I am using python 2.7.3 and bin/py interpreter prompt to run : >>> master = TestableMaster() >>> master.start() But the following error occurs : -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/testing/helpers.py", line 186, in start self.start_runners(runners) File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/bin/master.py", line 385, in start_runners for runner_config in config.runner_configs: File "/home/sandesh/mail_man/mailman-3.0.0b2/src/mailman/config/config.py", line 215, in runner_configs for section in self._config.getByCategory('runner', []): AttributeError: 'NoneType' object has no attribute 'getByCategory' ------------------------------------------------------------------------ should i not use bin/py or anything else need to be done.

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Barry Warsaw 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

On Dec 22, 2012, at 12:04 AM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: >Yes i was using python's default interpreter which was causing >problems. /bin/py worked. Cool. >While making "class FakeArgs" for starting master process in mailman, > i am doing config = make_config(), > which gives the following error : make_config() is only useful for tests. Are you writing a unittest or doctest? Note that make_config() requires that the test live in the ConfigLayer or higher (zope.testing layers are a confusing construct since they don't follow normal Python inheritance rules, but for now, we're stuck with it.) Look at TestStart in commands/test/test_control.py. Note that doctests by default live in the SMTPLayer, which is higher than ConfigLayer and thus acceptable. >------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >[config_file = os.path.join(os.path.dirname(config.filename), new_config) > File "/usr/lib/python2.6/posixpath.py", -----------------------^^^ Although this is probably not your problem, Python 2.7 is now required for Mailman 3. Cheers, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Barry Warsaw 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

On Dec 21, 2012, at 02:49 PM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: >from mailman.commands.tests.test_control import make_config > >i got the following error: > >------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >Traceback (most recent call last): > File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> > File "mailman/__init__.py", line 50, in <module> > from mailman.core.i18n import initialize > File "mailman/core/i18n.py", line 31, in <module> > from flufl.i18n import PackageStrategy, registry >ImportError: No module named flufl.i18n > >----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > flufl.i18n is present in "eggs" directory which is above the mailman >directory in hierarchy , so just mentioning "from flufl.i18n" can not >detect the required python module. > >How can this problem be fixed ? Did you type this into the interpreter prompt? If so, how did you start Python? Where exactly did you "run this"? Note that the standard Python interpreter doesn't have its sys.path set up to import from the eggs directory. Use bin/py for that. (If you're wondering what the difference is between `bin/py` and `bin/mailman shell`, it's that the latter does all the Mailman initializations necessary to operate Mailman. E.g. it inits the log system, the ZCA, etc.) Cheers, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Wiki woes
by Paul Boddie 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

Hello, I was just reading the discussion about Wiki migration from Confluence to MoinMoin on this list (mailman-developers). When this topic was first raised, a mailing list was set up along with some other resources for collaboration: http://lists.bjdean.id.au/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mmwiki http://moinmo.in/ConfluenceConverter I was under the impression that people would be following the dedicated mailing list for this work (mmwiki), but it would appear that this is not the case. The last message I sent on this topic was this one: http://lists.bjdean.id.au/pipermail/mmwiki/2012q3/000095.html In fact, it touches upon the very issue that seems to be causing problems now: Confluence appears to have changed and useful functionality has been removed. Although this affects Confluence users in a negative way, it may have an impact on the exported form used in any migration work as well. If you would like a summary of the work I have done so far to migrate the content, take a look at the following mail: http://lists.bjdean.id.au/pipermail/mmwiki/2012q2/000092.html There's another mail (cross-posted to moin-user) which references the content repository used as the basis of this effort, too: http://lists.bjdean.id.au/pipermail/mmwiki/2012q2/000094.html As far as I know, the volunteer to whom I was responding has not done any work on this. In short, after Bradley Dean's initial research, I have written something which can convert Confluence content, although there will undoubtedly be things that need finishing, and if you take a look at the ConfluenceConverter pages, you may also be able to identify functionality that needs deploying or implementing in MoinMoin depending on the project's needs. So, I would recommend that you don't start from scratch on this. If you like, I can even make an example of the migrated content available on the Internet so that you can see what needs doing, but you will, of course, need to let me know. I was going to mail this list (mailman-developers), given that the other one (mmwiki) seems dormant, and apologise for not having done so earlier, but this initiative really needs input from the actual Wiki users to be worthwhile, in my opinion. Please let me know if you want to take this work any further. Paul

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Barry Warsaw 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

On Dec 21, 2012, at 01:29 AM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: >1. I was going through ~/runners/lmtp.py in mailman 3 source code and >found a line "from zope.component import getUtility" but there is no >folder named zope anywhere, am i missing something ? After you've done the buildout steps, you'll notice a directory at the root called 'eggs'. These are a Python packaging format, which can be directories or zip (.egg) files though we only use directories. If you look in there, you'll see a zope.component egg directory which buildout grabbed from PyPI. When you run scripts in the bin directory, buildout will have set up all the magic so that imports from the eggs directory Just Work. Note that once we get to deploying this, we won't use buildout eggs. Most likely, dependencies such as zope.component will come from your OS vendor. Or alternatively, if you use virtualenv, those would also be downloaded from PyPI, although the mechanism to make them available to Python code is somewhat different. You can always test this out interactively: $ bin/py Python 2.7.3 (default, Dec 12 2012, 19:00:09) [GCC 4.7.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> import zope.component >>> zope.component.__file__ '/home/barry/projects/mailman/3.0/eggs/zope.component-4.0.1-py2.7.egg/zope/component/__init__.pyc' >>> >2. Where are the definition of all the functions of classes defined in >/mailman/interfaces in mailman 3 source code present ? These you do have to hunt around for. Many are defined in the various src/mailman/model/*.py classes, but those are only the Storm ORM classes. Others can be defined almost anywhere. Some of the interfaces define "utilities", essentially singleton instances implementing an interface. If you look at src/mailman/config/configure.zcml, you'll see the zope.component definition file hooking those interfaces up to the classes that implement the utilities. Others are "adapters", which take one interfaces and wrap them up into other interfaces. E.g. if you have an IMailingList and want to get an IBanManager from it, you "adapt it" in zope.component parlance. Inside configure.zcml, you'll see where the class implementing the adapter (a.k.a. the "factory") is defined. Some interfaces can have multiple instances, and the classes implementing them can live anywhere. There's no registration service for such things because they usually aren't instantiated by interface name, so they are harder to find. Examples include the IRule instances (which live in src/mailman/rules/*.py) or the IHandlers (src/mailman/handlers/*.py). It's helpful to have a good support from your text editor or file system to find things, such as a class browser, tags, or for Emacs users bzr-tools-grep. Cheers, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Terri Oda 20 Dec '12

20 Dec '12

On 12/10/2012 10:51 AM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: > Hey Terri, i would really like to make a written transcript while i learn > about the architecture. Writing them as soon as i learn would be much > easier, for that i would require the write access to wiki. > > I created my launchpad account with email id: sakuag333(a)gmail.com > I am not sure which username are you talking about. That would be great! The wiki has a separate account system from launchpad, sadly, and can be found here: http://wiki.list.org

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Mailman will be sprinting at PyCon US 2013 -- Join us!
by Terri Oda 16 Dec '12

16 Dec '12

For anyone who was wondering, yes, Mailman is planning to be sprinting at PyCon US 2013. I know Barry, Florian, Mark and I say we're going, and I'm sure more people will speak up as they figure out their schedules. PyCon US 2013 is March 13-21 in Santa Clara https://us.pycon.org/2013/ I know it's a ways off, but I'm mentioning it down because the applications for financial aid close on Dec 31st and I want any of you who could use some to get your applications in ASAP. You can register for Pycon and apply for financial aid here: https://us.pycon.org/2013/registration/ Note that if you just want to come to the sprint, that's free and you can just show up. (This is what I did last year, but I hear pycon is awesome and you should all want to register for the conference!) Hope to see some of you in March! Terri

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Reminder: Mailman/Postorius/Hyperkitty hackathon
by Florian Fuchs 15 Dec '12

15 Dec '12

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hi there, this is just a quick reminder that we're having another virtual hackathon tomorrow! Personally, I'll probably start hanging around on #mailman on freenode around 13:00-ish (UTC). Hope to see you tomorrow! Florian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/ iQEcBAEBAgAGBQJQy2oxAAoJEAszfsgOAINuJ2IH/RaY9wrVzVUPDqNkCLi36NoE PPmmOadmmu1jrz37bok6t1HKy50mr3OBx1ZhYiwYGIHvXejjfLBFty7buEPE/lMu XNe9+/maT9LU9zBV2iKKBuJQdzDls8C1cOSR71uxaqo/vJNORYZLAH6C7gH6usby DzIZ87zjfQWtJje1yg+1djf/CsSD4rLT65941S5ehIiQoWqitQOS5BAQLDQlAdo8 KR8hvX92QtSyva0Fffa/3etK2JudYic0f8volPbbAdND4/g0ZDzpeWlGESO5vFu1 u01i2h/jaKHmoELsvKSkKv4ckyZPEMNeZc04cagpbvhRY+1TQBRXJ0EPYLr0Wps= =YYG1 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Wiki woes
by Paul Boddie 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

I wrote: > On Thursday 13 December 2012 18:59:40 Mark Sapiro wrote: > > I haven't looked at much, but the biggest problem I see is for example > > <http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/DOC/Frequently%20Asked%20Questions?action=re > >ca ll&rev=5> versus > > <http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions>. The issue > > is the FAQ in particular relies on the listing of child > > pages to make a hierarchical TOC, and the converted pages have lost > > the child pages listing. > > Yes, the child pages are recorded, but they need to appear below their > parents in the page hierarchy. Actually, looking at this again, it isn't really possible to nicely represent child pages as subpages in Moin in general, and I did actually write a note in my converter that child/parent/ancestor relationships should not affect the way pages are organised, but this information will need to be captured somehow. One alternative is to just read the child page references and then generate a list at the end of each page's content. This might not be wonderful for capturing the relationships, but there are ways of at least searching Moin for pages that link to others, so there will be possibilities to retain the navigational information to an extent. I could imagine using page metadata to record such information and to provide extensions that can understand it, possibly even extending the search mechanism, but this would obviously involve some extra effort. Paul

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Mailman3 and LDAP
by Christian Dröge 12 Dec '12

12 Dec '12

Hi, I have a question regarding mailman3 and ldap. Is there some kind of ldap support in mailman3? I heard that it should support it somehow but I did not find any references to ldap in the code, so I guess this feature is currently not available. I know, that mailman3 is currently in development, but I am interested, if this will be a supported configuration in the future. Thank you. Christian

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Wiki woes
by Terri Oda 12 Dec '12

12 Dec '12

I think in the latest wiki update I seem to have lost the ability to turn off rich text editing, and as a result it's nigh impossible for me to cut and paste some types of content from one page to another. Also, some pages are now missing content (specifically, anything marked as a code snippet) if they're viewed without JavaScript. I know we've been under some pressure from the FSF to switch to a more free wiki, and they'd offered to find us some help in doing the migration. Does anyone know the status of that? Because if we're using the wiki as our primary place for docs, not being able to see pages properly without JavaScript is potentially a really big problem for us. And personally, not being able to cut and paste from one page to another makes it awfully hard for me to wiki garden so that things are easy to find and in the right place. Terri

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Using bracketed prefixes in subject as filters
by Terri Oda 11 Dec '12

11 Dec '12

On 11/23/2012 01:55 PM, Gordon P. Hemsley wrote: > I filed a request for enhancement about using bracketed prefixes in > subjects as filters: > > https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1082495 > > Barry mentioned that I should raise the issue with regard to the dlist > discussion, I presume because my proposal overlaps and/or conflicts > with it. > > However, the only things I know about what a "dlist" even is has been > garnered from skimming the four messages on the topic in the archive, > and it's not clear to me they my idea is necessarily compatible with > dlists. (They seem to be exclusive proposals that may handle the same > usecase.) I already responded in the launchpad bug, but actually, I think they're pretty similar, only dlists only uses the listname+topic email format to designate sublists/topics, and the current scope of what we're doing doesn't look at archives, just about delivery of mail to users who may have chosen only some topics they want from a given list. I think it'd be easier to add the prefix and archive capabilities once we have dlists working with Mailman 3. We already have the dlist code for Mailman 2.1 (and I believe that's all available on launchpad somewhere; ping me if you can't find a link and want one), and we *did* have a Google Summer of Code project aimed at porting this code to Mailman 3. Unfortunately the student was unable to complete the project (for personal rather than technical reasons which it would be impolite to share), so two of us from Systers are working on the port. The architecture looks compatible and we've got our best guess on the necessary data structures/database tables now. We're hoping to have it done in January and are actively working on it, so maybe it'd be best to wait 'till that port is done and then look at what will be needed to extend it? Terri

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Barry Warsaw 10 Dec '12

10 Dec '12

On Dec 09, 2012, at 10:32 PM, Sandesh Agrawal wrote: >I am particularly interested in this bug/wishlist : >#1082495 Support bracketed prefixes in subject as >filters<https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1082495> >https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/1082495?comments=all > >But not sure where to start from or which part of code to see... > >Also can you suggest me some easier bugs to start with. It will almost definitely be better to start with some easy bugs, which you can find as Mark indicated. While MM3 is still lacking better "big picture" documentation, I would recommend reading some of the docs at http://packages.python.org/mailman/ Something like bug 1082495 will probably touch several parts of the system, so you'll want to familiarize yourself with the concept of queue runners, rule processing, pipeline handling, etc. You might also be interested in this talk I gave at Pycon 2012. http://pyvideo.org/video/688/mailman-3 and at this chapter in AOSA v2: http://www.aosabook.org/en/mailman.html Hope that's a good start! -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Sandesh Agrawal 10 Dec '12

10 Dec '12

Thanks barry, i got my answer. I will go through the resources you mentioned.

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New to mailman
by Stephen J. Turnbull 10 Dec '12

10 Dec '12

Sandesh Agrawal writes: > But i have no idea about how to proceed , can somebody help me please. Well, first you need to tell us where you're stuck! The basic procedure is 1. Get a Launchpad account (sooner or later). 2. Check out the most recent commit to the sources you're interested in (Mailman 2 or Mailman 3, or both). 3. Find a bug. 4. Fix the bug. 5. Create a branch in your own workspace, and commit the bugfix to it. 6. Push the branch to your launchpad account. 7. Link your branch to the relevant issue. 8. (optional) Make a merge request on Launchpad. 9. (more optional) Announce the fix here. Quite likely you already know some or all of the above, but at least that will provide a framework to help us navigate to your stuckness. Thanks for your interest, and good hunting! Steve

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] New to mailman
by Mark Sapiro 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

Sandesh Agrawal wrote: > >Also can you suggest me some easier bugs to start with. Look at bugs tagged 'easy' <https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bugs?field.tag=easy>. -- 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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New to mailman
by Sandesh Agrawal 09 Dec '12

09 Dec '12

Hi, I have been going through certain bugs and wishlist on launchpad, and i would like to solve some of them. But i have no idea about how to proceed , can somebody help me please. Thanks

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Logo license
by Pierre-Yves Chibon 04 Dec '12

04 Dec '12

Good morning everyone (© Farnsworth), I was wondering if there is a specific license for the Mailman logo. I could find the svg file on the website [1] but it does not mention a license. Basically, we have someone interested in working on an icon for hyperkitty as part of the Google Code-In and I was wondering if we could reuse/modify/use part of the mailman logo. Thanks, Pierre [1] http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/otherstuff.html

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