Folks,

I'm pleased to announce the release of Mailman 2.0 beta 6. In this release most of the bugs and patches submitted to SourceForge have been resolved. See below for a list of changes since 2.0 beta 5. I've tested this release with Python 1.5.2, 1.6, and 2.0beta1+CVS.

This will be the last beta before 2.0 final. I think Mailman 2.0 is now stable enough to be unleashed on the unsuspecting public :). Besides, it's way overdue and there are lots of important new features that are backed up waiting for this to get out.

I plan to release 2.0 final about a week after Python 2.0 final is released. That currently puts Mailman 2.0 final out on lucky Friday October 13th. If the Python release is pushed back, Mailman may be pushed back too.

Much thanks to everyone who has helped Mailman to where it is, either through bug reports, patch submissions, important feedback, and extensive testing. I'd like to single out Jeremy Hylton on this release for coming to the rescue at the last minute and working on Pipermail to fix bugs, add support for non-ASCII charsets, and improve its performance.

[Side note: I was in New York City last night doing a gig at the Lion's Den with my band, and I met the guitarist's Linuxhead network administrator friend. We were talking geek shop after the show and I mentioned I worked on "a mailing list manager". He said, "Oh, like Mailman?" :) ]

As usual, you can get the tarball from SourceForge

http://download.sourceforge.net/mailman/mailman-2.0beta6.tgz

or list.org

http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz

or (soon) ftp.gnu.org

ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/mailman-2.0beta6.tgz

Enjoy, -Barry

2.0 beta 6 (22-Sep-2000)

- Building
    o Tested with Python 1.5.2, Python 1.6, and Python 2.0 beta 1.
      Conducted on RH Linux 6.1 only, but should work
      cross-platform.

    o Configure now accepts --with-username, --with-groupname,
      --with-var-prefix flags.  See `configure --help' or the
      INSTALL file for details.

    o Setting the CFLAGS environment variable before invoking
      configure now works.

    o The icons are now copied into $prefix/icons at install time.
      Patch by David Champion.

- Standards
    o Compliance with RFC 2369 (List-*: headers).  Patch by
      Darrell Fuhriman.  List-ID: header is kept for historical
      reasons.

    o Fixes by Jeremy Hylton to Pipermail in support of non-ASCII
      charsets, based on the Content-Type: and encoded-words in
      the original message.  Mail headers are now decoded as per
      RFC 2047.

    o Many more bounce formats are detected: Microsoft's SMTPSVC,
      Compuserve, GroupWise, SMTP32, and the more generic
      SimpleMatch (which catches lots of similar but slightly
      different formats).

- Defaults
    o Email addresses can now be obscured in Pipermail archives by
      setting mm_cfg.ARCHIVER_OBSCURES_EMAILADDRS to 1 (obscuring
      is turned off by default).  Patch provided by Chris Snell.

    o The default NNTP host can now be set by editing
      mm_cfg.DEFAULT_NNTP_HOST.  Patch by David Champion.

    o The default archiving mode (public/private) can now be set
      by editing mm_cfg.DEFAULT_ARCHIVE.  Patch by Ted Cabeen.

- Web UI
    o The variable details pages in the administrators interface
      is now `live', i.e. there's a submit button on the details
      page.

    o A link to the administrative interface is placed in the
      footer of the general user pages (authentication still
      required, of course!)

    o The user options change results page has a link back to the
      user's main page.

    o In the admindb page (for dealing with held postings), the
      default forward address is now listname-owner instead of
      listname-admin.  This avoids bounce detection on the
      forwarded message.

- Miscellaneous
    o Fixed config.db corruption problem when disk-full errors are
      encountered.

    o Command line scripts accept list names case-insensitively.

    o bin/remove_members takes a -a flag to remove all members of
      a list in one fell swoop.

    o List admin passwords must be non-empty.

    o Mailman generated passwords are slightly more mnemonic, and
      shouldn't have confusing character selections (i.e. `i'
      only, but no `1' or `l').

    o Crossposting to two gated mailing lists should be fixed.

    o Many other bug fixes and minor web UI improvements.