Today I am releasing Mailman 2.1.5, a bug fix release that also contains new support for the Turkish language, and a few minor new features. Mailman 2.1.5 is a significant upgrade which should improve disk i/o performance, administrative overhead for discarding held spams, and the behavior of bouncing member disables. This version also contains a fix for an exploit that could allow 3rd parties to retrieve member passwords. It is thus highly recommended that all existing sites upgrade to the latest version.
The full source tarball, as well as a patch against Mailman 2.1.4 have been made available. See
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103for links to downloads.
NOTE: You will want to read the UPGRADING file for important information regarding upgrading from earlier version to Mailman 2.1.5. A number of internal file formats have changed so you must shut down web and mail access to Mailman before you upgrade. You will also want to re-run configure (i.e. config.status) before you run "make install".
See also:
http://www.list.org
http://mailman.sf.net
http://www.gnu.org/software/mailmanFinally, a personal note. I have left Zope Corporation to join Secure Software, a company started by John Viega -- Mailman's original author. Although I won't be working on Mailman in any official capacity, it is exciting to be working with him and the rest of the folks there. I leave Zope Corp on a positive note and wish nothing but success for them too.
You can find Secure Software on the web at http://www.securesoftware.com. Please continue to use my barry@python.org email address for all Mailman correspondences. I don't expect much to change for the Mailman project at all.
Enjoy, -Barry
2.1.5 (15-May-2004)
- The admindb page has a checkbox that allows you to discard all held
messages that are marked Defer. On heavy lists with lots of spam holds,
this makes clearing them much faster.
- The qrunner system has changed to use only one file per message.
However the configuration variable METADATA_FORMAT has been removed, and
support for SAVE_MSGS_AS_PICKLES has been changed. The latter no longer
writes messages as plain text. Instead, they are stored as pickles of
plain strings, using the text pickle format. This still makes them
non-binary files readable and editable by humans.
bin/dumpdb also works differently. It will print out the entire pickle
file (with more verbosity) and if used with 'python -i', it binds msg to
a list of all objects found in the pickle file.
Removed from Defaults.py: PENDINGDB_LOCK_TIMEOUT,
PENDINGDB_LOCK_ATTEMPTS, METAFMT_MARSHAL, METAFMT_BSDDB_NATIVE,
METAFMT_ASCII, METADATA_FORMAT
- The bounce processor has been redesigned so that now when an address's
bounce score reaches the threshold, that address will be sent a probe
message. Only if the probe bounces will the address be disabled. The
score is reset to zero when the probe is sent. Also, bounce events are
now kept in an event file instead of in memory. This should help
contain the bloat of the BounceRunner.
New supporting variables in Defaults.py: VERP_PROBE_FORMAT,
VERP_PROBE_REGEXP
REGISTER_BOUNCES_EVERY is promoted to a Defaults.py variable.
- The pending database has been changed from a global pickle file, to a
unique pickle file per mailing list.
- The 'request' database file has changed from a marshal, to the more
secure pickle format.
- Disallow multiple password retrievals.
- The email package is updated to version 2.5.5.
- New language: Turkish.
- Bugs and patches: 869644, 869647 (NotAMemberError for old cookie data),
878087 (bug in Slovenian catalog), 899263 (ignore duplicate pending
ids), 810675 (discard all defers button)