Folks,

I've built the tarball for the Mailman 1.0b7 release, however since John appears to be not reading his email during the holiday season, the Web pages at www.list.org have not yet been updated. For now, you can grab the tarball from

ftp://ftp.python.org/pub/tmp/mailman-1.0b7.tgz

and we'll get the Web site updated ASAP.

Below is an excerpt from the DONE file which gives some highlights for this release. My hope is that y'all will bang on this version in the next week or two and, if there are no showstoppers, we can get the full 1.0 release out by mid-January. Given the holiday season, a couple of weeks late isn't so bad!

Let me also say that we've got a huge backlog of very good suggestions, contributions, ideas, etc. and on behalf of the other 3 core developers I thank you and encourage you to continue giving feedback. I've spent most of the last 10 days on vacation just trudging through 400-odd messages that I'd accumulated, and I think 1.0b7 fixes most of the really nasty bugs that have been reported up until now.

What I haven't done is spend much time adding new features and I don't expect to until after 1.0 final is released. I firmly believe we need to get a stable 1.0 out RRSN, then we can begin to prioritize the new features for 1.1. High on my list is internationalization and an improved Web navigation interface. Longer term, I'm looking at Zope <www.zope.org> as a possible platform for Mailman. I know John, Ken, and Scott all have their priorities too. Big thanks go to those guys, and especially Scott Cotton, for their work on this release.

Enjoy, and have a Happy New Year. -Barry

-------------------- snip snip -------------------- 1.0b7

• Many, many bug fixes. Some performance improvements for large lists. Some improvements in the Web interfaces. Some security improvements. Improved compatibility with Python 1.5.

• bin/convert_list and bin/populate_new_list have been replaced by bin/add_members.

• Admins can now get notification on subscriptions and unsubscriptions. Post are now logged.

• The username portion of email addresses are now case-preserved for delivery purposes. All other address comparisions are case-insensitive.

• New default SMTP_MAX_RCPTS that limits the number of "RCPT TO" SMTP commands that can be given for a single message. Most MTAs have some hard limit.

• "Precedence: bulk" header and "List-id:" header are now added to all outgoing messages. The latter is not added if the message already has a "List-id:" header. See RFC 2046 and draft-chandhok-listid-02 for details.

• The standard (as of Python 1.5.2) smtplib.py is now used.

• The install process now compiles all the .py files in the installation.

• Versions of the Mailman papers given at IPC7 and LISA-98 are now included.