From: "Tauren Mills" tauren@servlets.net To: mailman-developers@python.org, "mailman-users" mailman-users@python.org Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:05:44 -0700 Subject: [Mailman-Developers] RE: [Mailman-Users] Virtual Hosts -- can mailman handle them better?

It is good to hear that this is already supposed to work, but this is not what I have experienced. I have set "Host name this list prefers" and it still returns emails with the main domain name in them. Maybe I have something configured incorrectly. I'll go poke around some more.

It's likely that your MTA (sendmail, or whatever you're using) is doing this, not mailman. Try some experiments passing things directly to your MTA claiming to originate from your virtual host, and see if they get transformed on the way through. If not, i'm not sure what to suggest - i believe numerous people are using the virtual host mailman feature successfully.

Re having mailman host multiple lists having the same list name but different domains, i think thomas fasth's suggestion is a good one - use separate mailman installs for separate lists. (You'll have to work out the MTA details to dispatch to the right mailman install according to the domain...)

Making a single mailman handle multiple lists with the same apparent name would take another level of indirection in the mailman code on the maillist names, plus an option on the mailman pipe command lines. If you're interested, this is doable, but definitely not trivial. I doubt it will happen until someone directly needing it makes the effort.

...

I'm not aware of any easy solution to that problem. Sure, we could add another option to the "newlist" script for specifying the list's default URL (and another for it's mail domain), but I don't think that's a particularly neat solution...

We are trying to automate as much of our system as possible. We would love to make it so that when a customer orders a mailing list service, it is automatically installed and configured. With this in mind, it would really make sense for the newlist command to be able to accept a bunch of command line parameters instead of stdin.

It's not an instead kind of thing - it does both. (At this point it may be worth "getting your hands dirty" reading a bit of mailman's python code. In particular, the docstring for the newlist command gives you the invocation info; there may be other questions you have that would be answered in a similar way...)

I think that there are many ISPs that would absolutely love a mailing list system like Mailman if it had virtual hosting support built right in flawlessly (we certainly would!). We've managed to tweak Majordomo a bit so that it kind of works. And now we've kind of got Mailman working too. But we really would like it to make our lives easier in a virtual hosting environment, since that is pretty much all we do all day long.

Clearly virtual hosting is important in the ISP world, and mailman certainly provides some capability there. However, we simply *can't* aim for flawless in any of the myriad dimensions where mailman operates limits in both directions, of course...

• mailman has to do a lot of things well, not just any one thing. It's at these limits where open source, and a particularly comprehensible implementation language like python, can be a saving grace. There are

Ken Manheimer klm@digicool.com