Mailman 3 October 2018 - Mailman-Developers

before next release: disable backscatter in default installation
by Jo Rhett 08 Nov '22

08 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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New gitlab subproject for UX?
by Máirín Duffy 20 Oct '18

20 Oct '18

Hi! I'm Mo, I haven't worked on Hyperkitty in a long while but have done a lot of UX work on it in the past. Due to various circumstances I am interested in coming back to the project and contributing again. I was hoping to maybe be able to create a new subproject on gitlab for UX issues (I use this model of doing UX work under a separate subproject and using the repo to host UX mockups for other projects and it works well.) If that sounds reasonable and you'd have me, can you help set me up with a UX subproject? My gitlab username is mairin. Cheers, ~m

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Bug 373083 - help me out here?
by Dennis Carr 16 Oct '18

16 Oct '18

Running 2.1.23 on Debian Stable, working with the package in the Debian Apt repos. I'm looking at bug 373083 in light of recent user complaints of formatting, and this seems to be the closest match - everything that's posted to my lists comes out in the distribution as MIME encoded. Most of what happens is weird formatting errors. I see that there's a patch for this, but I don't see a clear indication of version - which strikes me as important owing to that the link in Launchpad is from nine years ago. Moreover, I'm a little worried about modifying existing code. To this end, I'm looking at modifying the configuration, but I'm a bit confused - the bug suggests this: DECORATE_CHARSETS = [DECORATE_MCSET, DECORATE_LCSET, 'utf-8'] ...and I'm not seeing that in there. Do I simply add that line? (Of particular note is that the lists are in English, ergo ISO-8859-1.) -Dennis Carr

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