Mailman-Developers March 2018

mailman-developers@python.org

5 participants
6 discussions

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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Hyperkitty and Django Q
by Leon Merten Lohse 20 Mar '18

20 Mar '18

Startled by the observation that Hyperkitty's unit tests to fail because an excessive amount of file descriptors are opened, I began to dig a little. The majority of these file descriptors are opened by "Django Q" -- a django library for asynchronous tasks. I wondered what these asynchronous tasks might be in an e-mail archiver. After all, it has to perform 2 very specific jobs: 1. Receive e-mails via http requests, process them, and store them in a database. 2. Display the collected e-mails. On top of that, it generates some statistics, includes a voting system, and allows replying to e-mails in a forum-like fashion. Job 1 really requires very little processing and is mostly database IO as the message has to be sorted and its position in the thread has to be computed. None of this can be efficiently performed in the background/asynchronously because there is nothing to be parallelized. Performing the *whole* receive-and-store operation non-blocking also is not an option -- ultimately mailman needs to know if it succeeded. Job 2 is more or less what every web application does (reading from a database and rendering the result) and certainly does not require any asynchronous processing. So where is Django Q used in Hyperkitty? It all boils down to the file hyperkitty/tasks.py where a smaller number of asynchronous tasks are defined. They can be grouped into 3 classes: - query mailman core - repair the data structure (empty threads, orphans, ...) - rebuild query cache I would like to argue that none of these 3 groups of tasks need to be performed asynchronously. - Mailman-core only needs to be queried when mailing lists are changed. This is triggered by signals from postorius and in addition periodically by a cron job. - The data structure should not need to be repaired in the first place but the appropriate on_delete/on_save triggers should take care of this -- and I believe they do in recent versions. If for some reason the database becomes corrupted one can always start a repair operation. Nothing is gained however, from running this asynchronously. - Lastly the cache rebuild: Currently Hyperkitty rebuilds its cache (which caches the db queries, not the frontend) whenever an e-mail is received. Since it only involves *reading* from the db it actually is something that *can* be done asynchronously to reduce the time it takes to process an incoming e-mail. But is it really worth the tremendous additional complexity that is introduced by Django Q? - requires a "qcluster" to run in the background (see shipped unit file) - loss of determinism / debugging becomes much harder - enourmous amount of file descriptors are opened in testing - additional dependency A similar result can be obtained by simply scaling the wsgi application accordingly (if needed) and/or optimizing the db queries. Alternatively one could simply invalidate the affected caches instead of rebuild them every time an e-mail is received or don't trigger cache rebuilds on received e-mails at all... But maybe I overlooked something. I argue that we do not *need* Django Q. The question is: do we want it? What are your thoughts on this? Best Leon

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Problem running tox on hyperkitty
by Abhilash Raj 20 Mar '18

20 Mar '18

On Tue, Mar 20, 2018, at 9:03 AM, Abhilash Raj wrote: > > > On Tue, Mar 20, 2018, at 5:57 AM, Leon Merten Lohse wrote: > > On 19.03.2018 23:30, Mark Sapiro wrote: > > > I am trying to run > > > > > > tox -e py35-django111 > > > > > > on HyperKitty. I run into an issue in that the tests run up to a point > > > after which all but the last 2 fail with a "too many open files" > > > exception. These files are logs created in directories > > > /tmp/hyperkitty-testing-*, and over 100 /tmp/hyperkitty-testing-* > > > directories are left behind. This is with an open file limit of 1024. > > > > It might look like that but the logs are not the actual problem as those > > files are properly closed after the test finishes. > > > > I tried to disable logging to files all together but the problem persisted. > > > > The real cause for the excessive number of file descriptors is django-q, > > which creates opens lots and lots of files (for inter process > > communication?). > > It was trying to create File Descriptors and failing every time, but I > am not 100% sure if that itself is the reason for this. It could be, but > I can't replicate this issue easily, What I meant was, I can replicate the issue but haven't yet been able to find something that fixes this issue. I really shouldn't email before morning coffee. > maybe filing a bug with django-q > and seeing what they think might be worthwhile? > > > > > Best > > Leon > > _______________________________________________ > > Mailman-Developers mailing list > > Mailman-Developers(a)python.org > > https://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: > > https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/raj.abhilash1%40… > > > > Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 > > > -- > Abhilash Raj > maxking(a)asynchronous.in > _______________________________________________ > Mailman-Developers mailing list > Mailman-Developers(a)python.org > https://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: > https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/raj.abhilash1%40… > > Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 -- Abhilash Raj maxking(a)asynchronous.in

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Problem running tox on hyperkitty
by Mark Sapiro 20 Mar '18

20 Mar '18

I am trying to run tox -e py35-django111 on HyperKitty. I run into an issue in that the tests run up to a point after which all but the last 2 fail with a "too many open files" exception. These files are logs created in directories /tmp/hyperkitty-testing-*, and over 100 /tmp/hyperkitty-testing-* directories are left behind. This is with an open file limit of 1024. If I raise the limit to 4096, everything runs and no /tmp/hyperkitty-testing-* directories are left behind, but it seems perhaps hyperkitty/tests/utils.TestCase._post_teardown() should have something added to undo what hyperkitty/tests/utils.setup_logging() sets up. -- 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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3.1.x REST API enhancements around preferred email address
by Scott Koranda 08 Mar '18

08 Mar '18

Hello, I am interested in contributing enhancements around preferred address to the REST API for version 3.1.x. To prove out my use case(s) and familiarize myself with the code I have made changes already. Here are some example curl command line invocations and output to illustrate: 1) Create an address for an existing user and mark that address as the user's preferred address: curl -u restadmin:restpass \ -X POST \ -d email=skoranda(a)example.nil \ -d preferred=1 \ http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8/addres… This returns a '201 Created'. 2) Return the preferred address, if set, for a user: curl -u restadmin:restpass \ -X GET \ http://mystestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8 | python -m json.tool { "created_on": "2017-11-11T22:20:45.950949", "display_name": "Scott Koranda", "http_etag": "\"26bc0d9f21eb145248884aedae4c1ffd00b608d2\"", "is_server_owner": false, "password": "$6$rounds=656000$gWGfwpajfZ7rVn5O$Sl559B2TgtpJWXA2i67G5ukjzkV6iTp4NgP.6FJpMFMUTDdDXULAmwdN8YW92w87EdctgqFqAUkUqS6.EOTCz/", "preferred_address": "skoranda(a)example.nil", "self_link": "http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8", "user_id": "e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8" } 3) Update/patch a user to set a preferred address: curl -u restadmin:restpass \ -X PATCH \ -d preferred_address=skoranda(a)example.nil \ http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8 This returns a '204 No Content'. 4) Get all addresses for a user with the preferred address (if set) having the attribute 'preferred' set to 'true': curl -u restadmin:restpass \ -X GET \ http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8/addres… | python -m json.tool { "entries": [ { "email": "skoranda(a)example.nil", "http_etag": "\"492824d150f9f11e32d530d3cad0f76422bddb48\"", "original_email": "skoranda01(a)example.nil", "preferred": true, "registered_on": "2017-11-13T22:35:17.232180", "self_link": "http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/addresses/skoranda@example.nil", "user": "http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8", "verified_on": "2017-11-20T16:48:51.738145" }, { "email": "skoranda01(a)example.nil", "http_etag": "\"f0f28c1c6a925a595269d3fe21ef7fc1515d7670\"", "original_email": "skoranda01(a)example.nil", "registered_on": "2017-11-20T16:46:20.941262", "self_link": "http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/addresses/skoranda01@example.nil", "user": "http://mytestbed.com:8001/3.1/users/e57ecfd0c0c74a319ac958b18882a6d8", "verified_on": "2017-11-20T16:46:20.941595" }, ], "http_etag": "\"89c46bd312c6f1a344e6e6180aed6f11b62e6048\"", "start": 0, "total_size": 2 } Before I submit a pull request I would be grateful for any comments or feedback on the functionality as illustrated above, or any other comments or feedback. I will also begin the "copyright assignment" paperwork as explained at https://wiki.list.org/DEV/Home Thank you for your consideration. Sincerely, Scott Koranda

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mailman3_router router configuration for exim4 not working
by Kamran Soomro 08 Mar '18

08 Mar '18

Hi, I have followed the instructions at https://github.com/maxking/docker-mailman and copied the config files for exim4 from the core/assets/exim directory to /etc/exim4/conf.d/main. However, when I run update-exim4.conf I get the following error; 2018-03-08 14:28:59 Exim configuration error in line 238 of /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp: main option "mailman3_router" unknown Invalid new configfile /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp, not installing /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated.tmp to /var/lib/exim4/config.autogenerated After a bit of investigation I noticed that the mailman3 router and transport configurations appear before the begin router and begin transport sections in the autogenerate file. Is this expected? If not, how can I fix this? –Kamran

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Mailman-Developers March 2018