Mailman 3 June 2013 - 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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A list of discussion topics: GSoC OpenPGP Integration
by Abhilash Raj 07 Aug '13

07 Aug '13

This is a list of topics that probably needs to be discussed in detail again. I tried to mention in breif about the discussions in past personally with a someone or on mm-dev list. Please ignore the topics which you feel has already reached a inference. It is a long mail though. * How to ensure the keys belong the email it says it does? One method proposed for this was to send a confirmation email to the email address, but what if the email is intercepted in between and the attacker confirms the sign up of the person he is trying to impersonate? Or this is a problem that can be solved with SSL and is not of our concern? * Inline pgp should be supported or not? Although its not included in one the best practices but some people still use it for the purpose of signing only a part of the email. * How to handle partial multipart/signed messages? In previous discussion it was pointed out that we should strip off the parts till we actually arrive at a point where the signature verifies all the text and then send that part to the subscribers. Other options were to discard these kind of email or let the owner decide what he wants. * Should mailman keep the signature of sender before signing or strip if off? In previous discussions it was mentioned that user's signature can be kept as it is and the list re-signs the message before sending the subscribers as subscribers may want to confirm if the email was originally sent by the user in the From address. But there might be a case of anonymous list where identity of the sender should not be revealed and is only verified that any one the members sent the email. So can we introduce this as an option? About introducing options I agree to a point mentioned in the mailman-pgp-smime patch for mailman where it says that although there are lots of ways we can allow the list owner to configure a list, we should only provide minimal options to avoid unexpected scenarios where the list's security is compromised due to lots of options. * Should we make the sending of signed copies of email default? We can introduce an option to send signed email by default for those who want may verify the email, but is there a point in sending singed email when the mails received are not signed? Or this could be a good point? * Email interface to manage keys? Mailman has a set of email commands to process the requests for subscription, change password and many other things over email without a web interface, so to allow managing keys over email we could allow receiving signed emails with new keys and command to add them, the confirmation mail for the new key will then be sent to the same address but would expect a signed reply from the new key. * How are we actually using the web-of-trust model of OpenPGP? Should there be any restrictions on the key to implement the web-of-trust model which advocates for the authenticity of the key provided by the user? Something like it must be signed by 2 or 3 people or anything like that? About the implementation I decided to take up with the processing of email part first and then setting up the PKI for the users. The flow would be something like this: * the message is queued in incoming queue * the incoming runner wakes up, finds the message and calls a few functions to verify the signature of the message(assuming the function already has public key of the user from somewhere) * If the message signature is found to be valid the message is then passed on to onther runners as usual (without stripping of the signature as per my assumption till now, need discussion on this) else it is dropped or bounced depending on the state of verification( like if the signature is older we can inform the sender as the delay may have been due to smtp deliver and simply drop the message if the signature is verified to be wrong). * Now a valid signature would be a signature signed within 4 days(default and configurable by list owner) from when mailman receives the email.(Is there someway to also check if the signature was previously sent on the list? so that we can block that also?) * After that the message passes on to various other queue and runners as usual and when finally it arrives at outgoing runner it again calls a few functions to sign the message and send it to MTA. I think the function to prase message, check signature, resign message could be there in utilities as a gpg.py module. Which is where I think I should first start from. I was looking for a python wrapper for gnupg and found two options: [python-gnupg][2] and [gnupg-interface][3]. GnuPG-Interface was what was used in pgp-smime patch for mailman 2.1.5. I don't have much idea about waht should be used, will post on mailman-developers. About the outgoing messages i was thinking if we can create a signing queue and sign runner which simply signs each message with list's private-key and then the message moves on to outgoing queue where it can be delivered without any furthur changes. Any ideas about this? -- Abhilash Raj

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman search function (was?? Re: Like to participate in GSOC 2013 (GNU Mailman) - Like some ideas proposed in the list (Django, Python))
by Mark Sapiro 30 Jun '13

30 Jun '13

On 06/29/2013 07:33 PM, Chris Cargile wrote: > FWIW, I'd also like very much if anyone could provide a few lines recap of > the activity on the ModernArchiving topic under "initiatives and proposals" > as I feel my thoughts on searching/archiving tie into the > objectives/requirements listed there: > http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/ModernArchiving See <https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/> -- 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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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman search function (was?? Re: Like to participate in GSOC 2013 (GNU Mailman) - Like some ideas proposed in the list (Django, Python))
by Mark Sapiro 30 Jun '13

30 Jun '13

On 06/29/2013 07:12 PM, Chris Cargile wrote: > I'm not sure where things stand regarding search for mailman- > however, I found Ian > Hicks<http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/commit-watchers-whatwg.org/>' > approach (of applying the HT-Dig capabilities to enhance a MM v2.0 instance > interesting, but perhaps overkill and/or not quite right) but a good > case-in-point for ideas. It appears the archive at the above URL employs the indexing and htdig patches for Mailman 2,1 originally developed by Richard Barrett <http://www.openinfo.co.uk/mm/index.html> and now maintained by me <http://www.msapiro.net/mm/>. > I resolved my need for making 'search' on my lists practically achievable > but in terms of overall integration into the fabric of mailman code, it is > insufficient. What more do you want? > If you want to see my search implementation, check out a prototype from me > on my AWS instance<http://ec2-54-224-162-128.compute-1.amazonaws.com/pipermail/mailman/> > . > > Please share your thoughts here or directly to me ;) Your prototype looks fine, but what's behind /cgi-bin/search.py ? Don't look for anything to be released for MM 2.1. The patches for htdig are available and other methods are referenced in the FAQ. If anything were to be released, it would be the htdig patches because that's what I use, but it's problematic because of the htdig dependency. For Mailman 3 the intent is that archivers will be "plugable", and the defaults will be <http://www.mail-archive.com> and <https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/> -- 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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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Mailman search function (was?? Re: Like to participate in GSOC 2013 (GNU Mailman) - Like some ideas proposed in the list (Django, Python))
by Chris Cargile 30 Jun '13

30 Jun '13

FWIW, I'd also like very much if anyone could provide a few lines recap of the activity on the ModernArchiving topic under "initiatives and proposals" as I feel my thoughts on searching/archiving tie into the objectives/requirements listed there: http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/ModernArchiving More concisely, where I have search capability, my goal of integrating more 'robustly' is I think one that will rely upon a channel of communication being established with the archiving mechanisms, if I understand the mm 2.0 codebase well enough. It may have been a while since anyone here has spent much time in the version mm 2.0 code, but would love to start discussing/working with anyone who's taking that on in v3.0..anyone? On Sat, Jun 29, 2013 at 10:12 PM, Chris Cargile <follybeachris(a)gmail.com>wrote: > I have observed the mailman development activities for a while but have not > chimed in recently. > > My initial aim for contributing was to offer input as to the search > functionality feature request. > > In as much as there is a lot to gain from the continual flow of ideas that > I feel are spawned by my watching and considering the list posts, I find at > times it is a little arduous of a task to get the fine details I seek on > specific matters such as the search features' progress (this is intended to > be as much as compliment as anything, I suppose) ...or that I am grateful > for a chance to suggest my technique to tackle this 'burden' of organizing. > > Whereas, certain resources may lead one to dismissively settle on allowing > google site-crawlers to work, this technique doesn't work (I'm glad) for > many, and I'm not sure where things stand regarding search for mailman- > however, I found Ian > Hicks<http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/commit-watchers-whatwg.org/>' > approach (of applying the HT-Dig capabilities to enhance a MM v2.0 instance > interesting, but perhaps overkill and/or not quite right) but a good > case-in-point for ideas. > > I resolved my need for making 'search' on my lists practically achievable > but in terms of overall integration into the fabric of mailman code, it is > insufficient. > > If you want to see my search implementation, check out a prototype from me > on my AWS instance< > http://ec2-54-224-162-128.compute-1.amazonaws.com/pipermail/mailman/> > . > > Please share your thoughts here or directly to me ;) > _______________________________________________ > 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/follybeachris%40g… > > Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 >

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Mailman search function (was?? Re: Like to participate in GSOC 2013 (GNU Mailman) - Like some ideas proposed in the list (Django, Python))
by Chris Cargile 30 Jun '13

30 Jun '13

I have observed the mailman development activities for a while but have not chimed in recently. My initial aim for contributing was to offer input as to the search functionality feature request. In as much as there is a lot to gain from the continual flow of ideas that I feel are spawned by my watching and considering the list posts, I find at times it is a little arduous of a task to get the fine details I seek on specific matters such as the search features' progress (this is intended to be as much as compliment as anything, I suppose) ...or that I am grateful for a chance to suggest my technique to tackle this 'burden' of organizing. Whereas, certain resources may lead one to dismissively settle on allowing google site-crawlers to work, this technique doesn't work (I'm glad) for many, and I'm not sure where things stand regarding search for mailman- however, I found Ian Hicks<http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/commit-watchers-whatwg.org/>' approach (of applying the HT-Dig capabilities to enhance a MM v2.0 instance interesting, but perhaps overkill and/or not quite right) but a good case-in-point for ideas. I resolved my need for making 'search' on my lists practically achievable but in terms of overall integration into the fabric of mailman code, it is insufficient. If you want to see my search implementation, check out a prototype from me on my AWS instance<http://ec2-54-224-162-128.compute-1.amazonaws.com/pipermail/mailman/> . Please share your thoughts here or directly to me ;)

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Mailman structure
by Nghia Vu Truong 25 Jun '13

25 Jun '13

Hi everyone, I am currently doing a project of expanding Mailman features. However, I am a newbie, so I want to understand the structure of Mailman coding files. Could any one know about this please help me, or please let me know which documents related to this problem! Thanks so much Nghia Truong

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Auth/auth for Django
by Barry Warsaw 25 Jun '13

25 Jun '13

I just saw this come across python-announce. Would this at all be helpful for Postorius or Hyperkitty? http://peterhudec.github.io/authomatic/index.html http://peterhudec.github.io/authomatic/examples/django-simple.html -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] GSOC Project Discussion
by Barry Warsaw 18 Jun '13

18 Jun '13

On May 13, 2013, at 10:52 PM, varun sharma wrote: >1. Suspend emails in vacation and post from multiple email ids: >IMember interface present in interfaces/member.py is already providing the >delivery_status enum in _client module via rest api but the user.save() is >currently not functional, so the member preferences are not getting saved >right now. Similarly, IUser interface in interfaces/user.py is providing >the user.addresses attribute from IAddress interface to _client module but >due to the problem of user object not getting saved, this functionality is >also not working. For these two features, i don't think there is any >requirement from mailman core interfaces. I think to do vacations right, you will need some additional support in the core. One question to answer first is: what's the scope of a vacation stop? Does it apply to an address, user, member, or all of the above? For example: when I go on vacation, do I want all deliveries to stop to all mailing lists I'm subscribed to on a particular site, or just to some subscriptions? My thinking is that two use cases would be good to support: - Stop all deliveries from this site for a user. This would mean setting vacation stops for all of the user's subscriptions to all of their mailing lists on a domain (it probably should not be cross-domain). - Stop all deliveries for a specific subscription or list of subscriptions. For example, when I go on vacation, I might want to only receive mailman-developers traffic but nothing else from python.org. These two use cases imply to me that a vacation stop is tied to a subscription (i.e. an IMember) and a global stop is just a trivial case of a set of specific stops. A few other core-touching changes: - The expiration date for a vacation stop should be set when the stop is created. A user should not have to do anything to start getting their email again. When the expiration date passes, the traffic starts up again. - You should be able to set a vacation stop to start sometime in the future. E.g. I know I am going on vacation from next Tuesday to Friday, so let me set that up now while I'm thinking about it. Don't make me wait until Tuesday morning when I'm freaking out about catching my flight. :) - You should be able to query the system to see what vacation stops you have coming up, or are in progress. Maybe even view the history of your vacation stops (but that implies more record keeping, so maybe not). - You should be able to adjust the start and end dates of the vacation stop, if they haven't already passed. You could use this to extend a vacation, or change the start date to Monday if you have to leave early. A special case of this would also be to cancel a vacation stop right now. - Remember that vacations shouldn't be used as a way to more permanently disable delivery to a mailing list. All of this implies to me a new table/record which records future and non-expired vacation stops. The table would have a start and end datetime and a link to an IMember. Then likely the member_recipients.py handler would take these stops into account when calculating who to deliver this message to. Question: Should you be able to add a vacation stop to moderator or owner emails? >2. Merge identities : >Not exactly sure about additional core requirements, but i think it can be >achieved by expanding IAddress interface. Mostly this will be able sending out and coordinating the various confirmations messages that will be necessary. E.g. you're logged in as anne(a)example.com and you make a claim to merge aperson(a)example.com. You need to prove that you own the latter address too in some way. Once you've confirmed ownership of both addresses, you need to IUser.link() them both to the same IUser. This may involve unlinking and deleting an obsolete IUser record from an IAddress. Cheers, -Barry

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Wiki Migration Update
by Paul Boddie 17 Jun '13

17 Jun '13

Hello, It's been a couple of months or so since my last update, and I finally got round to doing some more work on the content migration from Confluence to MoinMoin. As always, the results can be found here: http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/ At the moment, I'm still using the archived content from April 2013, and I took the opportunity this time round to fix various parsing and translation issues, particularly with the Confluence wiki markup (not the XHTML variant that the most recent revisions of pages use), also reworking some fairly fundamental mechanisms involved in parsing the wiki markup. Some previously mentioned fixes have been made: http://mmwiki.boddie.org.uk/COM/Organizations_that_use_Mailman (Anchors are now generated for the headings.) Some support for macros now exists, such as for the "anchor", "color" and "toc" macros. Meanwhile, some things wait for more time and energy to be spent on them: Author information is still not preserved in the page import process, but this will be tested in future. The way comments are presented on pages still needs improving. It might also be nice to have a list of attachments on pages that have them, and I will take a look to see how Confluence tends to present such things. And some things won't get fixed until the hosting is changed, such as for pages ending in a question mark. As I have mentioned previously, the source code for the converter can be found here: http://hgweb.boddie.org.uk/ConfluenceConverter/ Please take a look at your favourite pages and let me know where improvements can be made to the conversion process. Paul

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Mailman-Developers June 2013