Mailman 3 July 2016 - 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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Translation
by Simon Hanna 11 Jan '17

11 Jan '17

Hi, I just completed setting up the Mailman 3 projects on zanata.org They can be found here: https://translate.zanata.org/project/view/mailman https://translate.zanata.org/project/view/postorius https://translate.zanata.org/project/view/hyperkitty I'm hesitating to ask people to translate because zanata is really slow and I'm afraid of scaring people away from translating mailman in the future :D Anyhow, I'm writing to ask for your opinions. What do you think about zanata? Maybe you can try translating a couple of things and report how you feel about it. I stumbled across a few other open source solutions: https://translatewiki.net http://pootle.locamotion.org/ https://demo.weblate.org/ This mediagoblin issue discussed some alternatives when they switched away from transifex. https://issues.mediagoblin.org/ticket/913 There seems to be a pootle server run by gnu itself. https://chapters.gnu.org/pootle/ What do you think? Simon

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Docker files for mailman
by Simon Hanna 18 Nov '16

18 Nov '16

Hi, I started working on docker files for Mailman. I created three repositories: - https://github.com/simonsmiley/postorius-docker Holds the files needed to create a postorius container - https://github.com/simonsmiley/mailman-docker Holds the files needed to create a core container - https://github.com/simonsmiley/mailman-compose Holds docker-compose files that greatly simply the process of running the containers * The mailman repo currently lacks documentation * Currently no emails can be sent. I still have to figure out what the best way is... * Hyperkitty will be added next (together with a complete "bundler" install) I pushed two images to the docker hub. Their names are thelinuxguy/postorius and thelinuxguy/mailman I created two organizations mailman on docker hub and gnu-mailman on github https://github.com/gnu-mailman https://hub.docker.com/u/mailman/ I know we shouldn't use github, but there is no way around github/bitbucket for automated builds on docker hub. I post here to inform you about the docker images and I also to ask if I'm allowed to keep these two organizations and move my images/repos there. I'll happily give push/owner access to additional people if requested. The repositories could be mirrored to the gitlab mailman group, sadly the process doesn't work the other way round just yet. In case this request gets denied, I'll just remove the organizations and let the images be "unofficial". cheers, Simon

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wiki.list.org theme
by Jim Tittsler 26 Aug '16

26 Aug '16

In February, 2015 I changed the wiki.list.org theme to match the then current Mailman site theme. Since then, list.org got a much needed makeover. I've been trying to avoid volunteering to update the wiki theme, but you've cleverly out-waited me. May I have access to the wiki machine so that I can change the theme with access to the current content? Or, would someone be willing to archive up the current content/config and send it to me? The last time I overlooked some of the corner cases because I was working with my standard MoinMoin rather than the wiki.list.org content and configuration. Jim -- Jim Tittsler, Tokyo irc.freenode.net

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Thinking about Gmane
by Barry Warsaw 30 Jul '16

30 Jul '16

You may have seen this post from Lars Ingebrigtsen of Gnus and Gmane fame; it was linked from Slashdot over the weekend: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/ If you're not familiar with Gmane, you really should check it out while you can. I think it's the perfect companion to Mailman, providing free archives for open source mailing lists of all kind. My favorite thing about it is the NNTP interface to mailing list archives. Remember Usenet? It's really NNTP underneath and there are some excellent news readers that let you have very good access to years of older posts. I am a Claw-Mail user and it provides a fairly seamless integration of regular email and news (e.g. Gmane over NNTP). The powerful thing for me is that for mailing lists I care about, but don't want to be subscribed to, I can just catch up every so often on the Gmane newsgroup. I can even post from the Gmane mirror, and I don't have to keep personal archives of any mirrored public mailing list. All the Mailman lists are available on Gmane. But Lars has apparently burned out and is considering shuddering Gmane. This would be a huge loss for the FLOSS community IMHO, and I hope the outpouring of goodwill on his blog posts (along with any donations of time, resources, and money) will keep Gmane alive. It seems like all might not be lost: https://lars.ingebrigtsen.no/2016/07/28/the-end-of-gmane/comment-page-1/#co… Getting back to Mailman, I've long wanted a built-in NNTP interface to mailing list archives. Long ago I prototyped a bridge from Mailman 2 to NNTP via Twisted. It wasn't that much work, but of course it was only a prototype. With Mailman 3's architecture, I think it would be a fairly straightforward project, so I'm here to hopefully excite and challenge one of *you* to think about doing it. :) Of course, it wouldn't be Gmane, and I'm not sure we need exactly that. First, it wouldn't be federated across the wide FLOSS world, but it would still be extremely useful. Second, we have so much goodness in HyperKitty that the web side of Gmane wouldn't be as important for us. Still, the ability to have direct NNTP access to mailing list archives built into Mailman 3 would be really darn cool, IMHO. As an aside, Lars would make the whole of the Gmane spool available, and it might be really cool to see how well HK can consume and vend it. Given that Lars seems to say that it's more likely that the NNTP/SMTP bridge will survive, but not the web ui. Wouldn't it be cool if HK could serve as a modern version of a web ui to the Gmane treasure trove? Anyway, I'm putting this out there - hopefully some one of you might be willing and able to take it up. Cheers, -Barry

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Blog Post: GSoC : Message Queue based archiver project
by Barry Warsaw 29 Jul '16

29 Jul '16

On Jul 29, 2016, at 02:06 PM, Anirudh Dahiya wrote: >I've put up a blog post mentioning the progress made in the project. >http://codefullofsummer.blogspot.in/2016/07/a-long-due-post-status-update.h… Very cool, thanks for the blog post! We had a great discussion this morning on IRC about the Core issues and I think you have a plan for going forward. There's still a little sticky bit about how to handle the database migration, but we should be able to figure that out. Keep up the great work! Cheers, -Barry

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Blog Post: GSoC : Message Queue based archiver project
by Anirudh Dahiya 29 Jul '16

29 Jul '16

Hi I've put up a blog post mentioning the progress made in the project. http://codefullofsummer.blogspot.in/2016/07/a-long-due-post-status-update.h… Thanks Anirudh Dahiya (irc spark_)

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Countdown to the 3.1 release
by Barry Warsaw 13 Jul '16

13 Jul '16

Previously I mentioned the three big outstanding branches that I'd like to land for Mailman 3.1 Core, the templates branch, the MySQL support branch, and the unsubscription workflow branch. I've now also gone through all the bugs previously targeted to milestone 3.1, and there are only three left: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/milestones/2 I think these are important enough to fix for 3.1 and I welcome merge requests while the other three branches are ongoing. Please take a look at any other bugs not assigned to milestone 3.1 and let me know if you think any are serious enough to block the 3.1 release. I'll say in advance that I'm going to be brutal in assessing them, because 3.1 really needs to be released soon! Note too that there may be blockers for Postorius, Hyperkitty, and mailman.client, but I haven't looked at those subprojects yet. How close are they to being release ready? Cheers, -Barry

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Templates branch for Mailman 3.1
by Barry Warsaw 11 Jul '16

11 Jul '16

Hello developers! There are three big features still in progress for Mailman 3.1, the templates branch, MySQL support, and unsubscription workflow. There is already a merge request for MySQL support and I'm hoping to merge that soon. Abhilash is also working on the unsubscription workflow feature but there's no MR for that yet. The templates feature is very nearly done, so I think now is a good time to ask for testing, feedback, and review. This is a generalization of the welcome_message_uri feature in MM3.0 where you could specify e.g. the welcome message as a URL to download and cache when necessary. This is important because Core doesn't know whether there is even a web ui (e.g. Postorius) involved, or where things like clickable links to unsubscribe would be. Sites also want to customize footers to include information like codes of conduct, etc. Now (or when this branch lands), you will be able to specify a URL to retrieve any template that Mailman uses internally, whether they are confirmation messages, bounce probes, welcome and goodbye messages, etc. These can be templates for administrators, users, and members. Because I'm hoping to get some reviews, I'll point you at the documentation for more details: https://gitlab.com/warsaw/mailman/blob/templates/src/mailman/rest/docs/temp… The branch did end up being much bigger and tentacled than I expected, but it's all hanging together pretty well now, and all the tests pass. There's still a small number of to-dos, but some of them will get punted, and the others won't have a major effect on the overall use and visibility of the feature. https://gitlab.com/warsaw/mailman/blob/templates/TODO.rst Note also that if you interact with the REST API v3.0, nothing changes externally, but the old IMailingList attributes are mapped onto the new templates mechanism. API v3.1 is where you see all the actual new feature end-points exposed. Of course, any MM2 list converted to MM3.1 will use the new templates stuff too. Feedback very much welcome, either here or on the MR: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/merge_requests/170 I'd like to land this some time in the next week or so. Then I'll work on the other two big branches and start to release some betas. Cheers, -Barry

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Mailman-Developers July 2016