Mailman-Developers August 2015

mailman-developers@python.org

12 participants
10 discussions

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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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Interest in contributing to opensource (mailman)
by Terri Oda 22 Aug '15

22 Aug '15

On 2015-08-04 7:15 PM, Amate Yolande wrote: > Hello > > My name is Amate Yolande, a second year Computer Science student from > the University of Buea Cameroon. I am new to open source and interested in > contributing to mailman. I am primarily a Python programmer with basic > knowledge of Javascript and Django. I have successfully installed and run > mailman3 with Postorius and Hyperkitty locally, but I have no prior > experience with mailman so I would like to get directives on some > beginners tasks to help me familiarize myself with mailman. Hi Yolande! We try to tag our bugs as "beginner-friendly" or "easy" when we think they might be suitable for new contributors: https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/issues?label_name=beginner-friendly https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/issues?label_name=easy https://gitlab.com/mailman/hyperkitty/issues?label_name=easy https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/issues?label_name=easy There aren't a huge number of bugs in that category right now because we cleaned up a lot of the easier bugs before the release earlier this year, but one thing that is *always* helpful and reasonably beginner friendly is adding more test cases. There's a bug in postorius with a few hints as to how to get started: https://gitlab.com/mailman/postorius/issues/2 The other great thing to do as a beginner is to report bugs. And that's not just bugs in the software, but also bugs in the documentation: did you find anything stupidly confusing when you set up your instance? Is there anything you found hard to find on the website? Ask about it here, and maybe file a bug or two so we don't forget to fix things! It really helps us to have people coming in and seeing all that stuff with fresh eyes, so those are awesome things to do now before you get super familiar with the process! For example, having just answered this question, I can see that it would be super awesome if we had a page on the website telling new users where to find the easy bugs. Would you like to file that bug to get you started? You can do it from here: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-website/issues

1 0

Improving the mailman-bundler flow for production environments
by Terri Oda 20 Aug '15

20 Aug '15

Hi all, I've been made aware several times that the mailman-bundler docs don't work super well for folk who are focused on getting a production rather than a development server up and running. Now, I know we're hoping that there will be distro packages and an easier path for this eventually (please, if you're interested in doing some distro packaging, we need help!) but I thought I'd take a stab at making it better even for people going from source. I've started a fork with my first thoughts here: https://gitlab.com/terriko/mailman-bundler/blob/production-doc/README.rst It includes: - a new section "Development vs Production" with a note about the expected workflow (development->test->production) and a pointer to the production documentation (although I think my link is broken right now. My restructuredtext-fu is weak tonight and google didn't help.) - Something more explicit in "Run the services" about how to run django on something other than localhost. Those were the two things that really stood out for me when I was setting up a server this week, but I am certain they're not the only places where we could be more clear. So... I'd like some feedback! What seems confusing about the doc? What concerns are there for production servers that we aren't addressing? Terri PS - Don't worry, I will make a merge request when I fix the formatting errors, but it's late and I wanted to get an email out before I go to bed

1 0

[Mailman 3] Granting Postorius web access to Mailman users?
by Simon Fromme 13 Aug '15

13 Aug '15

Hello everybody, the company I am working for is currently evaluating whether or not to upgrade to mailman 3.0 from mailman 2.X. So far I am very impressed by the improved functionality and the good looking webinterface(s) and I am thankful for the good work. However, I am having some trouble understanding the procedure of granting users access to the Postorius webinterface. I created a bunch of Mailman users using the REST-interface (apparently inserted in table 'user' in var/data/mailman.db) which however are not automatically given access to the Postorius web interface, apparently only granted to users in the 'auth_user' table in var/mailman-web/mailman-web.sqlite. So my questions are: 1. What is the procedure of granting Postorius web access to Mailman users? 2. Is there a timeframe in which a good Mailman 3 documentation can be expected? I find it quite hard to solve problems myself given the small amount of informationon the web right now. Thanks a lot! Simon Fromme

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GSOC'15 blog report - mailman client in JS
by Ankush Sharma 11 Aug '15

11 Aug '15

Hello everyone, I have put up a blog report <http://black-perl.me/black-perl-gsoc-with-mailman-pre-end-term-report/> . Interested people can have a look and any feedback is always welcomed. Thanks, Ankush Sharma IIT-BHU Varanasi, India - 221005 http://black-perl.me

1 0

Mailman 3 Error & some questions
by Krinetzki, Stephan 05 Aug '15

05 Aug '15

Hello, I am planning to migrate from mailman 2.1.14 to mailman 3. At the moment mailman 3 is running on a new CentOS 7 server with postfix as MTA. But I have some questions and problems: 1. I have an error with hyperkitty ERROR 2015-07-29 08:11:02,287 update_index 7216 140406344681280 Failed to update the fulltext index: 'Command' object has no attribute 'commit' Traceback (most recent call last): File "/opt/mailman/mailman-bundler/eggs/HyperKitty-1.0.1-py2.7.egg/hyperkitty/job s/update_index.py", line 58, in execute update_index() File "/opt/mailman/mailman-bundler/eggs/HyperKitty-1.0.1-py2.7.egg/hyperkitty/sea rch_indexes.py", line 73, in update_index update_cmd.update_backend("hyperkitty", "default") File "/opt/mailman/mailman-bundler/eggs/django_haystack-2.4.0-py2.7.egg/haystack/ management/commands/update_index.py", line 233, in update_backend do_update(backend, index, qs, start, end, total, verbosity=self.verbosity, commit=self.commit) AttributeError: 'Command' object has no attribute 'commit' As far as I can tell, there is an error with the haystack indexing of archived mails. But how to fix this? I'm clueless. 2. In mailman 2, I've created a list and added a new owner. Then the owner get an email, with his password and a link to the admin page of the list. How does this work in mailman3? If I create an list in mailman3 and set the owner, then the email address is the owner, but he isn't noticed. So what steps are needed to get an password for the new owner and admin of the list? 3. Is it possible to get Shibboleth ( <https://www.shibboleth.net> https://www.shibboleth.net) working with mailman3? 4. The link in the welcome mail to the info page of the list is wrong. It says <http://lists.example.com/listinfo/list@lists.example.com> http://lists.example.com/listinfo/list@lists.example.com and if I visit this link, I get an 404 error. (example.com is here a real domain). The Second link says <http://example.com/me@host.com> http://example.com/me@host.com where the example.com part seems to be hardcoded. Thank you for your help and I hope my English is not too bad (I'm just a German IT Administrator...) Greetings from Germany Stephan Krinetzki

4 7

Interest in contributing to opensource (mailman)
by Amate Yolande 04 Aug '15

04 Aug '15

Hello My name is Amate Yolande, a second year Computer Science student from the University of Buea Cameroon. I am new to open source and interested in contributing to mailman. I am primarily a Python programmer with basic knowledge of Javascript and Django. I have successfully installed and run mailman3 with Postorius and Hyperkitty locally, but I have no prior experience with mailman so I would like to get directives on some beginners tasks to help me familiarize myself with mailman. Thanks Yolande

1 0

Why is postorius using python2?
by Simon Hanna 04 Aug '15

04 Aug '15

Hi there, I just downloaded the mailman3 code to see if I can contribute anything. I was astonished to find out that postorius still uses python2 although mailman made the switch to python3. Is there any reason behind this? I asked on the irc channel but got no answer so I'm trying here. I used 2to3 on the code and successfully executed the code. I executed the tests, and ran into some errors. If this work is going to be included sometime, I'm willing to investigate and try to fix these errors. Simon

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Merging users
by Barry Warsaw 04 Aug '15

04 Aug '15

On Jul 21, 2015, at 06:39 PM, Aurelien Bompard wrote: >If I try to associate an existing address to an existing user (without >this address obviously), the Mailman API will reply with a 400 error >"User already exists". Postorius currently does not detect that and >just errors out with a 500 page (but that's not the issue here). > >I think I need to merge the two users, and that's currently not >supported. I believe it would be a useful feature, so I'd like to >discuss it here. IMHO, the only tricky part would be to merge the >preferences associated with each user, but if I know which of my two >users has priority, I can just resolve the conflicts that way. >Am I missing something? Do you agree it would be a useful feature to have? So, Abhilash submitted a merge request to allow for unlinked addresses to be linked to existing users via the REST API. https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/merge_requests/30 That's essentially the correct fix for the first order problem (though there's a subtle bug in the mr that I will fix manually). If that answers your question, then great! Actually merging two existing users is indeed a tricky thing because users link to so many other interesting bits and pieces. Two separate users have two separate memberships, linked addresses, preferred addresses, and yes, preferences. There are also the created_on, display_name, and (the mostly unused) password attributes. How deep does merging users go? Cheers, -Barry

2 1

Re: [Mailman-Developers] Gsoc Status Update: Dashboard for Admins
by Abhilash Raj 01 Aug '15

01 Aug '15

Hey Bhavesh, On 07/25/2015 05:30 PM, Bhavesh Goyal wrote: > Hey ! > > I Just updated my Blog with an update of The Project Progress so far. > Attached to The Blog is also a preview of The Dashboard for those who > have't been able to test it yet on their machine. I had a look at your branch and also tested it out. I was not able to test each and every functionality, but am pretty impressed with your work. I liked that for smaller screens you can hide some widgets and switch between them from the nav bar. - The dropdown on the left-most of Nav Bar, does not look like a dropdown. Maybe add a caret symbol or something like that? - I had a small overview of the tests that you asked me to look at and they are good! Nice Work! -- thanks, Abhilash Raj

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Mailman-Developers August 2015