Mailman-Developers February 2021

mailman-developers@python.org

8 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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Mailman, postfix and docker
by costavitorino＠gmail.com 28 Mar '21

28 Mar '21

Hi all I'm upgrading a mailman2 installation to mailman3. And I using a docker implementation, created by me and not Maxking's implementation. Everything is installed and is served correctly. I have created a postfix container that relays emails to a smtp server, and I can send emails by telnet from it. When I create a new thread in Hyperkitty, I receive an error from postfix container that the user (mailing list name) is not found. And I believe that is obvious because the aliases db are not accessible by postfix. So, my questions are: - Is there a way to share aliases db between containers(different hosts) of mailman and postfix? I thought about sharing volumes but I'm not quite sure if it's the best solution - I've seen: virtual_alias_maps = mysql:/etc/postfix/virtual/existing_aliases.cf, var/lib/mailman/data/virtual-mailman to add in postfix main.cf. Is it possible to do the same thing to aliases and transport_maps? And if so, how to set it in mailman configuration, because this is for mailman I've seen this thread: https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-developers@python.org/thread/… And it seams kind or less the same situation. Does anyone have an idea or can give some pointers in how to accomplish this? Kind regards, Emanuel

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Development setup confusion
by Marius Ghita 25 Feb '21

25 Feb '21

I think a setup step might be missing from the developer's docs https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/devsetup.html If I go through the venv setup and when I call mailman info, the following error shows up (missing dependency). ... File "/home/_/Workspace/personal/mailman/src/mailman/__init__.py", line 38, in <module> from mailman.core.i18n import initialize File "/home/_/Workspace/personal/mailman/src/mailman/core/i18n.py", line 22, in <module> from flufl.i18n import PackageStrategy, registry ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'flufl.i18n' However, when I run just run tox, the .tox/qa/bin/mailman info command works without any issues.

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Re: Feature request, selective participatory threads
by Marius Ghita 15 Feb '21

15 Feb '21

"Used to be" seems to be the operative sentence, unfortunately. I have browsed various sources around the "Systers organization" keyword and what public repositories there might be, but no luck finding anything that includes the dynamic sublists implementation. I have found the document that describes the implementation, on (the old wiki?) wiki.list.org https://archive.vn/NLyl2 Based on that document I assumed the following rpm to contain the changes, but no luck. https://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/osl/systers-mailman/ (unpacked with "rpm2cpio ../mailman-systers-2.1.12-2012.12.27.el6.src.rpm| cpio -idmv") I think the document in itself can be a starting point for the implementation. If you have a contact email to someone that's part of the Systers group, it might be worth reaching out in order to upstream this feature. But I also have no issue with just diving into the codebase and building the functionality along the lines of the aforementioned document. On Sun, Feb 14, 2021 at 6:00 AM Stephen J. Turnbull < turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote: > Marius Ghita writes: > > > To that end, I would propose a new feature for Mailman to allow the > > user to be more selective with the emails it receives. > > This sounds a lot like the "dynamic sublist" feature that has been > implemented in the Systers' fork of Mailman. (They use Mailman as a > front-end for a lot of Systers-specific process, so upstreaming the > dynamic sublist part is not trivial.) > > Their repository used to be at git@github.com:systers/mailman3.git if > you want to take a look. (Note: I haven't been involved there for > several years. Their Mailman apparently was mature enough for them, > and their GSoC goals moved toward mobile app development, so they > didn't push to get GSoC students and we drifted apart). > >

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GSoC 2021 ideas
by Terri Oda 14 Feb '21

14 Feb '21

Happy new year everyone! I'm starting to prep Python for GSoC 2021, and I wanted to issue the usual invitation that we'd be happy to have Mailman as a sub-org if anyone wants to do GSoC this year. (Mailman's been fine as a separate org, but I have to do the paperwork for Python anyhow so I figured I'd offer if there's interest but no one wants to cover the admin side of things.) Also, I have two mailman related ideas! 1. Seamless archive converter for 2.1 -> 3.* A friend was grousing that there was no "nice" way to retain old archive urls without keeping a static copy of things, and it got me to thinking that it would definitely be possible to build something that handled the old urls and redirected or made them work seamlessly, but we didn't do it because parsing the old archives basically requires you to scrape them because otherwise we couldn't guarantee that the urls would be stable from a re-parsed mbox. It's boring and finicky web scraping work to associate the old url and do the right things to make it work seamlessly in hyperkitty, but probably not too hard, so I was thinking that it might be suitable for a GSoC student. 2. Old mailman "skin" for postorius Make mailman look like the 2.1 interface for people who really love the old system. There's a few options that would be different, but the goal would be to make it pretty much look the same only with a few options changed, for people who are very change adverse. We had intended for it to be *possible* to reskin Postorius, but I don't think too many people have done it, so this would be a test to see how doable that is and probably fix any underlying issues that make reskinning the interface hard. Honestly, we could also have a student do a brand new skin if we had someone who loved UI design, but I suspect replicating the old interface would be less work, and since this year's GSoC hours have been cut in half, i'd rather start with something easier. I've been out of mailman dev for 3 years, so I'm probably not the ideal mentor, but I'm up for helping on either of those if Mailman as a whole is interested in doing the GSoC thing this year. Terri

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Hyperkitty's ability to build a thread
by Danil Smirnov 13 Feb '21

13 Feb '21

Hi everyone and Abhilash in particular :) I've faced a case when Hypirkitty is unable to chain messages into a thread: https://wlug.mailman3.com/hyperkitty/list/wlug@lists.wlug.org/ (See messages with the subject "WLUG Meeting Feb 11th 2021! Topic: Good question!".) It's a quite disappointment as GMail does show them correctly - as a single thread. As per my small investigation, a subscriber Robert N. Evans seems to have "In-Reply-To" headers stripped from the messages that probably causes the thread to break. I wonder if Hyperkitty is able to leverage some other method to combine the thread correctly in this case? "Good" and "bad" message examples are in the attachment. Best regards, Danil Smirnov

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Feature request, selective participatory threads
by Marius Ghita 11 Feb '21

11 Feb '21

Greetings. I'm generally a Mailman user through all the open-source projects that require a user to join a mailing list before contributing to a project. As a user that occasionally contributes patches/PRs to random repositories, my mailing list subscriptions are short-lived because I always get more emails than I need. To that end, I would propose a new feature for Mailman to allow the user to be more selective with the emails it receives. The following scenarios are those that would work best for me. 1. If I send an email to a mailing list, any follow-up emails to that thread are sent to my inbox as well. 2. If a user sends an email through the mailing list that CCs/BCCs me I get all the follow-up emails in that thread as well. 3. Maybe -- and this one is more of an idea than something that I would actually use -- a generated email in the mail archive web view for each thread, to which I could send an email and be subscribed to any follow-up emails to that thread. For me, this feature would make emails more manageable, and have them behave like subscriptions to individual issues on issue trackers. My Python is rusty, at best, but I would be happy to help implement this feature in Mailman.

1 0

GSoC application
by Stephen J. Turnbull 05 Feb '21

05 Feb '21

Hi, everybody I would like to have Mailman participate in GSoC as a regular organization this year (as I mentioned earlier I'd like to go to the GSoC Mentor Summit if they have one -- I'm not *presuming* I'd be one of the ones to go, but 2 out of 3 or 4 seems like a better bet than one of the org admins at PSF doesn't go and then 1 out of 100+ PSF mentors ;-). The deadline for organization applications is Feb 19, and I'll probably get started on it tomorrow or Sunday. I think Abhilash already said he is in, so that's enough for me to get started on the application. Any objections from Mailman core? Anybody in or out of core interested in mentoring? If you're interested but not sure what it involves, feel free to ask me. Obviously some Python programming ability and familiarity with the Mailman 3 codebase are important, but you don't have to be a Python or Mailman core hacker to have a role, eg as a backup mentor, or helping set up a development environment. Steve

1 0

Core, Hyperkitty and Postorius releases
by Abhilash Raj 02 Feb '21

02 Feb '21

Hey Everyone, I am pleased to announce new stable releases for Mailman Core, Postorius, Hyperkitty. These include both new features and bug fixes. Complete change log for each components: Mailman Core 3.3.3: https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/mailman/en/latest/src/mailman/docs/NEWS.… Postorius 1.3.4 https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/postorius/en/latest/news.html Hyperkitty 1.3.4 : https://docs.mailman3.org/projects/hyperkitty/en/latest/news.html Minimum supported Python version is 3.6. You can install them using: $ pip install --upgrade postorius hyperkitty mailman We have also recently been working on making the installation instructions[1] to be more detailed and added a new FAQ[2] section for administrators where I hope to capture common questions from mailman-users list. Feedback or Merge Requests to improve these docs are welcome. You can either send an email or open an issue on Gitlab (easier to track) here[3]. [1]: https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/install/virtualenv.html [2]: https://docs.mailman3.org/en/latest/faq.html [3]: https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-suite-doc/issues Thanks to everyone who helped out with with this release and contributed if any way! :) thanks, Abhilash Raj On behalf of Mailman Core Team

1 0

Footer settings question: how common is dash-dash-space?
by Alessandro Vesely 01 Feb '21

01 Feb '21

Hi, my footer removal software fails on IETF's "last-call" mailing list because it looks for a line of underscores, whereas that list uses "-- ". That sequence is "the separator line between the body and the signature of a message", according to RFC 3676. However, I had never seen it in mailing list footers before. My experience with mailing lists is limited, so I ask you. Is that sequence common enough to try and catch it in a footer removal function? I asked the list owners, and they answered "We didn't choose these settings when the list was set up! It was probably just the default for that version of Mailman." Is that possible? TIA Ale --

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Mailman-Developers February 2021