Mailman 3 March 1999 - Mailman-Users

Mailman questions (moderation capabilities, mostly)
by RDB 31 Mar '99

31 Mar '99

Hello. I manage an electronic discussion list (with about 1700 subscribers, which sends out about 60-80 messages or so a day to each) which is currently being run on CREN ListProc 8. Unfortunately, we need to be able to switch this mailing list to some sort of moderated arrangement, as the off-topic posting and flaming by newbies has become unmanageable. ListProc 8's "moderation" capabilities are frankly pathetic, and we're investigating other possibilities. I hope you don't mind but I have a few questions about MailMan's moderation capabilities (and a few other capabilities): 1. We would like to have a semi-moderated arrangement where the first post from a new subscriber (subscriptions will be completely open) will go to a moderator. If this post is approved, then this subscriber is added to a "pre-approve" list so that any further messages they send go directly to the list without passing through moderation. The attitude we are taking is that the regular posters on our mailing list don't cause problems, and we don't want their posts to be delayed by requiring moderator approval just to catch the few fools who happen to pop up. This is the same arrangement that many moderated Usenet discussions groups use (i.e. soc.sexuality.general, and others). Is it possible with MailMan? 2. How are multiple moderators handled with MailMan? 3. We would very much like for subscribers whose mail starts bouncing to be unsubscribed automatically. Can MailMan do automatic unsubscribing of addresses which become invalid? 4. We would like for "unsubscribe me" messages to be filtered out and not go to the list. Can MailMan reject messages based on whether they look like something that should have gone to the mailing list software rather than the list? 5. This is actually essential... We need for our mailing list software to send confirmation messages to people who request a subscription, so subscriptions can't be spoofed to harass an unsuspecting person. Can MailMan do this? 6. Can users switch freely from regular (single-message) to digest (one big message once a day) mode freely, and back again? Also, can we tack a message to the bottom of every digest telling people how to unsubscribe? 7. Will we see a speed advantage if we use qmail rather than sendmail, or is sendmail OK? I'm asking because I seem to remember that MailMan has some bulk mail features, and I don't know if this means it isn't necessary to switch to qmail for speed reasons. We're probably going to be running this setup on Linux and Apache, for whatever that's worth... 8. It would be great if the list software didn't fail to recognize a user just because the machine name directly following the @ in their e-mail address was added, deleted, or changed. Does MailMan handle this gracefully? 9. Can you protect user's privacy with MailMan by forbidding people other than the list owner from requesting a list of the e-mail addresses of all the subscribers? 10. Is it possible to create "anonymized" message archives automatically, by stripping out or anonymizing the "From:" field (and, ideally, any identical e-mail addresses that are found in the body of the message such as in the signature) before sending the message to the archive? I have never seen a feature like this in another MLM packge, but I thought I'd ask... Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. Our second choice would be to hack MajorDomo so it will do all of these things, but it would be great if another free product (such as MailMan) met all of our needs right out of the box. Sincerely, Russell rdb(a)blarg.net

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1.0b9/b10 bug
by Terry Grace 31 Mar '99

31 Mar '99

I have a list set up that is set to allow members only posting. Every post, regardless as to whether the author is a list member or not, is being directed to the list-owner for approval. Anyone know how to fix?

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Just installed 1.0b10 and have problem with call to non-function
by Rupa Schomaker (list) 31 Mar '99

31 Mar '99

I'm not very familiar with python, so I'm not sure if I have enough info here, but... I just installed mailman (attempting to move from SmartList) and from what I've seen it is quite impresive. However, I see the following error when subscribing or unsubscribing (though not 100% consistant). === snip === Bug in Mailman version 1.0b10 We're sorry, we hit a bug! If you would like to help us identify the problem, please email a copy of this page to the webmaster for this site with a description of what happened. Thanks! Traceback: Traceback (innermost last): File "/home/mailman/scripts/driver", line 112, in run_main main() File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/handle_opts.py", line 104, in main list.DeleteMember(user, "web cmd") File "/home/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 931, in DeleteMember self.DeliverToOwner(msg, self.owner) File "/home/mailman/Mailman/Deliverer.py", line 136, in DeliverToOwner self.LogMsg('deliverer', TypeError: call of non-function === end of snip === So, what do I do now? >:) -- Rupa (rupa(a)rupa.com for normal email) Please don't email duplicate replies.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] exim
by J C Lawrence 31 Mar '99

31 Mar '99

On Thu, 28 Jan 1999 10:45:19 -0500 Brad Crittenden<bac(a)ivc.com> wrote: > hello: i've followed the threads on qmail and exim but i'm a bit > confused. it seems that mailman does not yet support qmail but > may soon. does it actually work with exim? I find that mailman works fine with Exim, and requires no patches or other tweaks to do so. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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installation problem
by nbecker＠fred.net 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

mailman-1.0b10. running make install tries to compile in the source directory. This is a problem because to do make install you had to su mailman, who doesn't have write access to the source. Workaround: 1) make -k install 2) su mailman 3) make install

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number of bounces
by Boris Goldowsky 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

How can one determine how many times mail to a user has bounced, and whatever other statistics mailman uses to decide whether to disable them? I'd like to know this in order to be able to debug/refine the bounce handling for my lists. Bng

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mailman, postifx, and bsdos3
by George M. Ellenburg (Mailing List Account) 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

Greetings! At the request of some of my customers, I've recently installed mailman on BSD 3.1, with Postfix beta-19990317-pl02 as the transport. Frankly, I'm a little confused with regards to the install instructions. Was wondering if anyone can provide some elightenment. I'm getting the following error when trying to create a test list: sundial:~/bin $ whoami mailman sundial:~/bin $ ./newlist Enter the name of the list: test Enter the email of the person running the list: gme(a)caffeine.sundial.net Initial test password: testpassword Traceback (innermost last): File "./newlist", line 141, in ? raise SystemExit(main(sys.argv)) File "./newlist", line 91, in main newlist.Create(list_name, owner_mail, pw) File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 658, in Create self.Lock() File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 1213, in Lock self._lock_file.lock('w|', 1) File "/usr/local/lib/python1.5/posixfile.py", line 190, in lock flock = fcntl.fcntl(self._file_.fileno(), cmd, flock) IOError: (22, 'Invalid argument') sundial:~/bin $ ----- George M. Ellenburg Tel: +1 407 438 6710 Systems Administrator, Fax: +1 407 438 6714 Sundial Internet Services, WWW: www.sundial.net a Division of Micro Mainframe Technology, Inc.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman, postifx, and bsdos3
by Viktor Szathmary 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

hi, > Traceback (innermost last): > File "./newlist", line 141, in ? > raise SystemExit(main(sys.argv)) > File "./newlist", line 91, in main > newlist.Create(list_name, owner_mail, pw) > File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 658, in Create > self.Lock() > File "/u1/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 1213, in Lock > self._lock_file.lock('w|', 1) > File "/usr/local/lib/python1.5/posixfile.py", line 190, in lock > flock = fcntl.fcntl(self._file_.fileno(), cmd, flock) > IOError: (22, 'Invalid argument') AFAIK, this problem will go away, if you install the latest version of python. cu viktor

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new lists
by Alan Neiman 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

Is there a way to change the defaults for the way a new list is setup? Or a way to change the options for a list from the command line? Alan Neiman alan.neiman(a)ihs.com Unix System Administrator Information Handling Services -------------------------------------------------------------- ** 1997 & 1998 World Champions ** 17 & 2 -- Simply The Best -- The Broncos -- The Denver Broncos ** 1997 & 1998 World Champions ** --------------------------------------------------------------

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1.0b10
by Barry A. Warsaw 30 Mar '99

30 Mar '99

Folks, please don't upgrade to 1.0b10 just yet. I think there's still a problem with address matching and case preservation. I have a fix and am going to do a bunch of testing, /and/ hopefully get some sanity checking from Ken on a few things. Once I get this fixed, I will release 1.0b11. Note that this should be unrelated to the problem that Clark is having. -Barry

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