This mail might help making Mailman more standards compliant. We all want that, right?

X-From_: mea@nic.funet.fi Wed Jun 2 15:15:26 1999 Subject: Re: Fwd: [Mailman-Users] smtplib From: Matti Aarnio mea@nic.funet.fi To: tomaz.borstnar@over.net (Tomaz Borstnar) Date: Wed, 2 Jun 1999 16:14:20 +0300 (EET DST)

    Yes ?

If mailman really does that, then it is as bad as M$ WinCE, which does same incorrect SMTP address productionn, but I don't recall having seen that problem. (a bit of web-browsing -- to locate the Mailman homepages, etc..)

Ok, I pulled in the current Mailman 1.0rc1 source, and found following at it (Mailman/pythonlib/smtplib.py):

def mail(self,sender,options=[]):
    """SMTP 'mail' command -- begins mail xfer session."""
    optionlist = ''
    if options and self.does_esmtp:
        optionlist = string.join(options, ' ')
    self.putcmd("mail", "FROM:%s %s" % (quoteaddr(sender) ,optionlist))
    return self.getreply()

def rcpt(self,recip,options=[]):
    """SMTP 'rcpt' command -- indicates 1 recipient for this mail."""
    optionlist = ''
    if options and self.does_esmtp:
        optionlist = ' ' + string.join(options, ' ')
    self.putcmd("rcpt","TO:%s%s" % (quoteaddr(recip),optionlist))
    return self.getreply()

Ok, the problem can be at how the quoteaddr() works, does it *always* yield addresses *with* "<...>" around them, or can it sometimes yield those without the wrappers ?

I would suggest it to always yield the target address *without* the "<..>" angle brackets, and then always to print those explicitely. That way there won't be some mystic cases where failures happen.

Another problem I have seen reports about are due to putcmd() function misbehaviour (belief that "all the world is Sendmail"):

def putcmd(self, cmd, args=""):
    """Send a command to the server."""
    str = '%s %s%s' % (cmd, args, CRLF)
    self.send(str)

That FORCES extra space in case the 'args' does not exist for some command (e.g. "DATA"). It should not.

The more I read the mailman documents, the more I am convinced that its coders use 'sendmail' as standard for how the RFC-821 can be ignored/abused. You really should have somebody running e.g. ZMailer in 'strict' mode, which will quickly weed out any protocol non-compliance.

OTOH: For ZMailer there are also better ways to submit a message, than doing it thru SMTP port. Methods that are way faster, and easily codable in Python (I have a sample in PERL, and in C, of course.)

/Matti Aarnio matti.aarnio@sonera.fi

...

...

X-From_: mailman-users-admin@python.org Tue Jun 1 19:08:56 1999 Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 12:13:26 -0400 (EDT) From: Dave Sill ds-list-mailman@sws5.ctd.ornl.gov To: mailman-users@python.org Subject: [Mailman-Users] smtplib X-Mailer: VM 6.71 under 21.1 "20 Minutes to Nikko" XEmacs Lucid (patch 2) Organization: Oak Ridge National Lab, Oak Ridge, Tenn., USA X-Face: "p~Q]mg{;e*}YR|)&Q/&Q\*~5UWfZX34;5M X-BeenThere: mailman-users@python.org

It looks like Mailman does:

MAIL FROM:mailman-owner@sws1.ctd.ornl.gov

instead of:

MAIL FROM:<mailman-owner@sws1.ctd.ornl.gov>

I wonder what other SMTP corners were cut.

-Dave

---

Mailman-Users maillist - Mailman-Users@python.org http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users

---

Tomaz Borstnar tomaz.borstnar@over.net "Love is the answer to the final question you ask" - Unknown

Tomaz Borstnar tomaz.borstnar@over.net "Love is the answer to the final question you ask" - Unknown