Mailman 3 April 2013 - Mailman-Developers

Introduction and some ideas
by Pratik Sarkar April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

Hi all, I am a 2nd yr undergrad student studying CS at Bengal Engineering and Science University, India. This is the first time I am participating in Google Summer of Code. And I am very interested to contribute to machine learning or NLP related projects. I went through the Python projects of gsoc 2013 and I found the anti-spam/anti-abuse filter of Mailman very interesting. I had some own ideas regarding the project. I want to integrate/use external NLP toolkits like Lingpipe and LIBSVM. Classification of the text will be done on an N-gram Language Model and a Support Vector Machine (I would prefer LIBSVM), with the "localized knowledge" (which would be used as the training set for the classifier) to help in identifying the abuse/spam. Adding a feedback procedure to the classifier might also be helpful as it will help us to improve classification and the classifier can update itself with previously classified spams/abuse and hence the program can filter latest spams/abuses without any update, on programmer's part. About me: 1. About 5 years of programming experience mainly in Java,python, C and C++ and a bit of PHP and LISP. I am a part of our college Software and programming club. 2. I qualified the Zonal Informatics olympiad 2010-11. I regularly participate in online coding competitions and hackathons. 3. Developed a email client in python. 4. I have some prior experience in machine learning and natural language processing. I participated in Twitminer 2013 (IISC Bangalore) where our team (BEing) came 6th. In the last few months, I have been working on the sentiment analysis of tweets, based on Language Models of Lingpipe Toolkit of Java.and LIBSVM to analyze the efficiency of classification. Looking forward to hear back from all of you! Pratik Sarkar

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Fwd: Eta patha
by Pratik Sarkar April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

Hi all, I am a 2nd yr undergrad student studying CS at Bengal Engineering and Science University, India. This is the first time I am participating in Google Summer of Code. And I am very interested to contribute to machine learning or NLP related projects. I went through the Python projects of gsoc 2013 and I found the anti-spam/anti-abuse filter of Mailman very interesting. I had some own ideas regarding the project.I want to integrate/use external NLP toolkits like Lingpipe and LIBSVM. Classification of the text will be done on an N-gram Language Model and a Support Vector Machine (I would prefer LIBSVM), with the "localized knowledge" (which would be used as the training set for the classifier) to help in identifying the abuse/spam. Adding a feedback procedure to the classifier might also be helpful as it will help us to improve classification and the classifier can update itself with previously classified spams/abuse and hence the program can filter latest spams/abuses without any update, on programmer's part. About me: 1. About 5 years of programming experience mainly in Java,python, C and C++ and a bit of PHP and LISP. I am a part of our college Software and programming club. 2. I qualified the Zonal Informatics olympiad 2010-11. I regularly participate in online coding competitions and hackathons. 3. Developed a email client in python. 4. I have some prior experience in machine learning and natural language processing. I participated in Twitminer 2013 (IISC Bangalore) where our team (BEing) came 6th. In the last few months, I have been working on the sentiment analysis of tweets, based on Language Models of Lingpipe Toolkit of Java.and LIBSVM to analyze the efficiency of classification. Looking forward to hear back from all of you! Pratik Sarkar

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Google summer of code 2013
by Richard Wackerbarth April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

As has been suggested previously, at this point it is best that you simply start the discussion here on the mailing list. All of the mentors read the list and technical discussions should involve the entire community. On Apr 10, 2013, at 9:25 AM, Pratik Sarkar <iampratiksarkar(a)gmail.com> wrote: > I am interested to work in the "Anti-spam/anti-abuse" in the Mailman > project for this year's Google summer of code.How can I contact the > respective mentors? > Regards, > Pratik > _______________________________________________ > Mailman-Developers mailing list > Mailman-Developers(a)python.org > http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers > Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 > Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ > Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/richard%40nfsnet.… > > Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Hi from a student interested in a GSoC project
by Elias Assarsson April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

Thanks. I will have a look at Config::Model too. Any pointers to good sample configuration files to use in trying to evaluate the mentioned tools? 2013-04-10 16:46, Paul Wise skrev: > In addition to Augeas, I would encourage you to look at Config::Model. > I think you will need the pair of them to do upgrades. There are a > number of blog posts on Planet Debian about it and I'm sure the author > would be willing to help out. > > http://planet-search.debian.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi?terms=Config::Model

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Fwd: Google summer of code 2013
by Pratik Sarkar April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

I am interested to work in the "Anti-spam/anti-abuse" in the Mailman project for this year's Google summer of code.How can I contact the respective mentors? Regards, Pratik

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] GSOC Project idea: OpenPGP integration
by Stephen J. Turnbull April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

Abhilash Raj writes: > Can you please point me in some direction to learn about the various > possible ways to sign a mail and/or encrypt it. Basically that's going to be MUA-dependent. There are standards for this (prominently S/MIME aka RFC 5751), but whether MUAs implement it is MUA-specific. Also, S/MIME is not the same as using OpenPGP (I guess that OpenPGP can be used to implement it, but I doubt that most systems using OpenPGP actually conform to S/MIME). I suspect that many webmail programs and Windows MUAs do not support OpenPGP (webmail programs generally don't support any form of secure mail AFAIK). Other important RFCs include PKCS (RFC 2315) and Security Multiparts for MIME (RFC 1847). (Do check those references before implementing them: I haven't followed this field that closely for several years, and several of them are probably superseded by now.) > Also i think adding the key as a new column against the email in > the list of subscriber would do the work. I still think you're getting ahead of yourself. What work are you talking about? Just getting keys stored in the subscriber database isn't much help if we haven't decided how we are going to use them.

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] GSOC 2013 - Introduction and Project Discussion
by Pierre-Yves Chibon April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

On Sat, 2013-04-06 at 15:03 +0530, Udit Saxena wrote: > 2. Web Posting Interface. I haven't really followed the GSoC ideas for MM3 this year but that line poped-up on my radar. Isn't this similar/overlapping to what HyperKitty already does? I don't think one would want to embed posting messages from the admin interface of mailman (postorious), so posting from an interface would have to deal with archives as well (since one might want to reply to an existing thread). That's the reasoning that brought me to the question above :) Did I miss something? Pierre

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] GSOC Project idea: OpenPGP integration
by Stephen J. Turnbull April 10, 2013

April 10, 2013

Abhilash Raj writes: > Well what i want to make it is that whenever a user sends a mail to the > list it should be singed with his private key so that it can be verified > against his public that he uploads if he wants permissions to post in the > list. You mean that the user should sign it himself (or with the help of his mail client), is that correct? > As the message is received by mailman its signature is verified and > then its encrypted and sent to each person, wherein those who > haven't uploaded their key will also receive an unencrypted > copy(with a probability that it may not be intended for them or not > authentic mail). I don't understand the use case for having both encrypted and unencrypted copies distributed. Is the encryption intended to be merely authentication? But what Mailman has is by definition the subscriber's public key; anybody might have that. It *could* be kept secret, but I think that's not so easy to prove. I would have imagined that maybe Mailman would resign using its own private key, to authenticate the list, and testify that it had authenticated the sender. I also don't understand what you mean by "not authentic mail". The original signature proves it authentic. The subscribers may not have the appropriate to key to verify, but in that case I don't see why they would want to delegate it to Mailman. I think you have a difficult task in merely specifying what you want this system to do. That's likely to be a couple orders of magnitude harder than the implementation! > Yes, this was on the top of my mind while trying to attempt this > project. I learned about key-servers. I think we could setup one > wherein all the public key would be stored that are uploaded by > users and retrieved when needed. But who watches the watcher? That is, what does the keyserver need to know about the key's owner, and how does the candidate subscriber prove it to the keyserver? I think there are lots of use cases for integrating mailing list managers into the public key infrastructure, but you need to be careful to specify them. I think you probably should start with simple use cases, like proving subscriber identity to the mailing list manager, eg for anti-spam purposes.[1] Footnotes: [1] Even that is not a sure winner, since most users will not know how to do this for themselves. So it will have to be integrated into clients, which themselves might be infected by a virus.

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OpenPGP Integration on GSoC
by Marcos Chavarría Teijeiro April 9, 2013

April 9, 2013

Hi all, My name is Marcos Chavarría and I'm a fourth year computer science student from Galicia, Spain. I'm interested in the OpenPGP integration project for this year SoC. I have experience working with python in several university projects and I have some knowledge about crypto primitives (I made Coursera Cryptography course[1]). The problem is that I'm not sure if I understand the idea. This is how I see it: 1) Users summit their public key to MailMan server when they register to mail list. 2) The user can get MailMan Server public key 3) When an user want to post a message they both sign and encrypt this message. They encrypt the message using MailMan public key. Then the message is sent to MailMan Server. 4) MailMan decrypt the received message and check if the sign is correct (with the stored public user public key). If the sign is correct, it sends a message to every mail-list subscripter encrypted with each user public key. 5) The other user receive the email and decrypt it. Is this correct? Best Regards, Marcos Chavarría [1] https://www.coursera.org/course/crypto

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Mailman/PSF GSoC Students: Next steps
by Florian Fuchs April 9, 2013

April 9, 2013

Hello prospective GSoC students, there are roughly four weeks left until the application deadline on May 03 2013. Sounds like a lot, but it time's running fast. ;-) The application period opens on April 22. Ideally, you should already have a pretty good understanding of the boundaries of your project proposal(s) around that time. So use this week and the next for further discussions, ask questions, do some reading. This will give you a better feel for what the overall work load might be (which is crucial for a healthy project timeline). Most important, don't worry about sounding stupid or not knowing something! There are several moving parts inside the Mailman software ecosystem and no-one expects you to grok everything right from the start. Once the application period has started, it's better to apply sooner than later. Don't worry if your application is unfinished -- it will be editable until the deadline (at which point it must, of course, be complete). But it's better to have it in the system early than to wait until the last minute. Just leave a note saying it's still in draft status. We will put an application template on the wiki to give you a rough outline of what we expect the applications to contain. Lastly, to avoid possible confusion: The mentoring organisation you have to apply with is the Python Software Foundation. Since the PSF handles a lot of sub projects like Mailman, it'll be a good idea to put "Mailman" in the title of your application so we can find it and nothing gets missed. Cheers Florian

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