Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that I've released Mailman 2.1 alpha 4. Below is the big list of changes with this release. This will be the last alpha release for 2.1, but this still leaves open the possibility of a few new features in MM2.1. I've got everything in that I intend to get in. If you've got a pet new feature -- and have code that implements it -- please do remind me about it now and I'll work on getting in what I can for the first beta. Apologies for falling so far behind in the mailing list traffic.

This is admittedly a bit of a rushed release. I really wanted to get this out before the end of the year (in my timezone at least ;). Depending on my other real-job commitments, I'll be spending all my spare time getting bugs fixed and moving toward the 2.1 final release. I'm shooting for release by the Python conference in February, but I don't know if I'll make it.

Cheers, and happy new year to you all.

I-swear-the-X-Oblique-Strategy-was-chosen-random-ly y'rs, -Barry

-------------------- snip snip -------------------- 2.1 alpha 4 (31-Dec-2001)

- The administrative requests database page (admindb) has been
  redesigned for better usability when there are lots of held
  postings.  Changes include:
    o A summary page which groups held messages by sender email
      address.  On this page you can dispose of all the sender's
      messages in one action.  You can also view the details of
      all the sender's messages, or the details of a single
      message.  You can also add the sender to one of the list's
      sender filters.

    o A details page where you can view all messages, just those
      for a particular sender, or just a single held message.
      This details page is laid out the same as the old admindb
      page.

    o The instructions have been shorted on the summary and
      details page, with links to more detailed explanations.

- Bounce processing
    o Mailman now keeps track of the reason a member's delivery
      has been disabled: explicitly by the administrator,
      explicitly by the user, by the system due to excessive
      bounces, or for (legacy) unknown reasons.

    o A new bounce processing algorithm has been implemented (we
      might actually understand this one ;).  When an address
      starts bouncing, the member gets a "bounce score".  Hard
      (fatal) bounces score 1.0, while soft (transient) bounces
      score 0.5.

      List administrators can specify a bounce threshold above
      which a member gets disabled.  They can also specify a time
      interval after which, if no bounces are received from the
      member, the member's bounce score is considered stale and is
      thrown away.

    o A new cron script, cron/disabled, periodically sends
      notifications to members who are bounce disabled.  After a
      certain number of warnings the member is deleted from the
      list.  List administrators can control both the number of
      notifications and the amount of time between notifications.

      Notifications include a confirmation cookie that the member
      can use to re-enable their subscription, via email or web.

    o New configuration variables to support the bounce processing
      are DEFAULT_BOUNCE_SCORE_THRESHOLD,
      DEFAULT_BOUNCE_INFO_STALE_AFTER,
      DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS,
      DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS_INTERVAL.

- Privacy and security
    o Sender filters can now be regular expressions.  If a line
      starts with ^ it is taken as a (raw string) regular
      expression, otherwise it is a literal email address.

    o Fixes in 2.0.8 ported forward: prevent cross-site scripting
      exploits.

- Mail delivery
    o Aliases have all been changed so that there's more
      consistency between the alias a message gets delivered to,
      and the script & queue runner that handles the message.

      I've also renamed the mail wrapper script to `mailman' from
      `wrapper' to avoid collisions with other MLM's.  You /will/
      need to regenerate your alias files with bin/genaliases, and
      you may need to update your smrsh (Sendmail) configs.a

      Bounces always go to listname-bounces now, since
      administration has been separated from bounce processing.
      listname-admin is obsolete.

    o VERP support!  This greatly improves the accuracy of bounce
      detection.  Configuration variables which control this feature
      include VERP_DELIVERY_INTERVAL, VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES,
      VERP_PASSWORD_REMINDERS, VERP_REGEXP, and VERP_FORMAT.  The
      latter two must be tuned to your MTA.

    o A new alias mailman-loop@dom.ain is added which directs all
      output to the file $prefix/data/owner-bounces.mbox.  This is
      used when sending messages to the site list owners, as the
      final fallback for bouncing messages.

    o New configuration variable POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS
      which should be set if you are using the Postfix MTA and
      want Mailman to play nice with Postfix-style virtual
      domains.

- Miscellaneous
    o Better interoperability with Python 2.2.

    o MailList objects now record the date (in seconds since
      epoch) that they were created.  This is in a hidden
      attribute `created_at'.

    o bin/qrunner grows a -s/--subproc switch which is usually
      used only when it's started from mailmanctl.

    o bin/newlist grows a -l/--language option so that the list's
      preferred language can be set from the command line.

    o cron changes: admin reminders go out at 8am local time instead
      of 10pm local time.

- Pipermail archiver
    o MIME attachments are scrubbed out into separate files which
      can be viewed by following a link in the original article.
      Article contains an indication of the size of the
      attachment, its type, and other useful information.

    o New script bin/cleanarch which can be used to `clean' an
      .mbox archive file by fixing unescaped embedded Unix From_
      lines.

    o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_SCRUBBER in
      Defaults.py.in which names the module that Pipermail should
      use to scrub articles of MIME attachments.

    o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_HTML_SANITIZER which
      describes how the scrubber should handle text/html
      attachments.

    o PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL has change its semantics.  It is now an
      absolute url, with the hostname and listname parts
      interpolated into it on a per-list basis.

    o Pipermail should now provide the proper character set in the
      Content-Type: header for archived articles.

- Internationalization
    o Czech translations by Dan Ohnesorg.

    o The Hungarian charset has be fixed to be iso-8859-2.

    o The member options login page now has a language selection
      widget.

- Building, configuration
    o email-0.96 package is required (see the misc directory).

    o New recipes for integrating Mailman and Sendmail,
      contributed by David Champion.