Mailman 3 November 2001 - Mailman-Users

spot of trouble migrating lists.
by F. Ross Lord Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Hello all. I have a problem and I'm not quite where to start. I have looked through the documentation as best I can, and I haven't found any good guides. I have about 40 mailing lists with archives on a mail server that is due to be turned off in about 2 weeks. I need to migrate all of those lists to another server. I have installed Mailman on the second server, and I can create/admin new lists that have been created on that server. I took one of my existing lists, copied everything in $prefix/archives/public/listname and $prefix/archives/private/listname, everything in $prefix/lists/listname to the new server. I ran $prefix/bin/new_list on it. Here is what works: the admin pages work the archive pages work the listinfo for the list works mail to the list works There is one thing that isn't working. The listinfo page (which has all lists served on that machine) does not have an entry for the list that was migrated. Does anyone know how I can resolve that? Also, if there anyone who has a good set of instructions for migrating lists that might help me, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance. -- frl -- *********************************** F. Ross Lord Server Team - VA webMethods, Inc. frlord(a)webmethods.com "..I do the science on my laptop.." ***********************************

1 0

Password really necessary??
by Daniel Abad Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Hi, I was looking for a mailing list system and Mailman seems to be very interesting... but I have a question. The Password is really necessary for the users?? I was thinking just to validate the email address, shoud this be possible?? Tks. Dan

1 0

Sendmail and virtual hosts
by Bill Moseley Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

I've got a setup where all mail that comes in to hank.org (except for a few other people) gets delivered to me. This is done with sendmail's virtusertable. The problem is that virtusertable seems to override the settings in the aliases file for Mailman. In my virtusertable I have: @hank.org moseley+%1 So if I have a list test(a)hank.org, and add aliases test: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post test" test-admin: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner test" test-request: "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd test" test-owner: test-admin mail to test(a)hank.org still goes directly to moseley. Anywone know a fix? Does Postfix make this kind of thing easier? Bill Moseley mailto:moseley@hank.org

4 5

problem during compiling
by rxie＠advent.com Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Hi, I always get this error messages even though I've already created the username as 'mailman' and group as 'mailman'. I am running Solaris 8 with python version 2.1.1 on UltraSpac 10. thanks, -Richard ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- --------- # ./configure loading cache ./config.cache checking for --with-python... no checking for python... /usr/local/bin/python checking Python interpreter... /usr/local/bin/python checking Python version... 2.1.1 checking for a BSD compatible install... ./install-sh -c checking whether make sets ${MAKE}... yes checking for true... /usr/bin/true checking for --without-gcc... no checking for gcc... gcc checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) works... yes checking whether the C compiler (gcc ) is a cross-compiler... no checking whether we are using GNU C... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking whether #! works in shell scripts... yes checking for --with-var-prefix... no checking for --with-username... mailman checking for mailman UID... Traceback (most recent call last): File "conftest.py", line 1, in ? import pwd, string ImportError: ld.so.1: /usr/local/bin/python: fatal: libgcc_s.so.1: open failed: No such file or directory cat: cannot open conftest.out configure: error: ***** No "mailman" user found! ***** Your system must have a "mailman" user defined ***** (usually in your /etc/passwd file). Please see the INSTALL ***** file for details.

2 1

umber of members on each page
by Simon Faulkner Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Where the members admin displays 30 members per page - can it do more? I would sacrifice a bit of speed for all 200 members on one page... Simon

2 1

Permission denied: '/home/mailman/lists/test/config.db'
by Bill Moseley Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Hi, Trying hard to figure this out myself :-( I was able to find a number of posts with this same problem, but no solutions. I wonder if I don't understand sguid very well. mailman 2.0.7, python 1.5.2. Sendmail 8.10.1 Linux mardy 2.2.13 #1 Mon Nov 8 15:51:29 CET 1999 i686 unknown (ya, time for an update...) Here's the setup: sendmail runs with a guid of daemon, and the web server has a Group of users. ./configure --with-mail-gid=daemon --with-cgi-gid=users (I ran make && make install as user mailman). Seems as if my /home doesn't allow suid, so I had to run bin/check_perms -f as root to correct the suid bits. Web interface works fine. I can add members to the test list without problem via the web interface. Here's what the files look like: > ls -ld /home/mailman drwxrwsr-x 19 mailman mailman 4096 Nov 25 11:27 /home/mailman I get the error when trying to send mail to the list: IOError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '/home/mailman/lists/test/config.db' Here's sendmail passing off to the wrapper: Nov 25 11:32:34 mardy sendmail[25300]: fAPJWYu25299: to="|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post test", ctladdr=<test(a)mardy.hank.org> (2/0), delay=00:00:00, xdelay=00:00:00, mailer=prog, pri=30051, dsn=2.0.0, stat=Sent Here's the wrapper. It's sguid. > ls -l /home/mailman/mail/wrapper -rwxr-sr-x 1 mailman mailman 30971 Nov 25 11:27 /home/mailman/mail/wrapper Here's the database, which has mailman group read access. > ls -l /home/mailman/lists/test/config.db -rw-rw---- 1 nobody mailman 2968 Nov 25 11:35 /home/mailman/lists/test/config.db So I'm a bit confused why the permission denied error. I'm trying to understand: --with-mail-gid=daemon says to compile the wrapper script to only run if it's run with a real guid of "daemon", which is what sendmail is running as. (the idea is to limit what can run the wrapper script). The wrapper script is set guid, so it should then be able to access the config.db, right? Same situation for the cgi scripts. Bill Moseley mailto:moseley@hank.org

2 2

Dissapearing messages
by David Ball Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Hi there Some of our users never receive messages from the list, despite the fact that I can see the message leaving our system as normal. This always affects the same users, and there are no error messages or bounces received by us or them. Messages sent from the console arrive correctly, and other bounce messages are received correctly too (ie address x(a)y.z is valid, fails to receive mail from the list, but receives mail sent directly from the console, a(a)y.z is invalid, and returns a bounce when sent from the console, other list members bounces etc. are received) I am using Postfix on rh7.1, and all outgoing mail is relayed via smtp.bt.net I am completely baffled - anyone got any ideas? DaveB

4 3

Re: [Mailman-Users] Dissapearing messages
by J C Lawrence Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

On Mon, 26 Nov 2001 12:53:54 -0000 David Ball <david.ball(a)brahler-ics.co.uk> wrote: > This always affects the same users, and there are no error > messages or bounces received by us or them. Messages sent from the > console arrive correctly, and other bounce messages are received > correctly too (ie address x(a)y.z is valid, fails to receive mail > from the list, but receives mail sent directly from the console, > a(a)y.z is invalid, and returns a bounce when sent from the console, > other list members bounces etc. are received) If the ISP in question is AOL you may be running into their RCPT TO spam filter. Try cutting the number of RCPT TOs per message down. -- J C Lawrence ---------(*) Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. claw(a)kanga.nu He lived as a devil, eh? http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/ Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.

1 0

Automatically Deleting Held Messages
by Jon Carnes Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

Description: On some of my mailman lists, I don't want to look at the held messages - I just want them deleted. Also, I'm never going to approve any subscribe requests for those lists - I just want them deleted as well! In the example below Mailman was installed in /home/mailman. I will use a list named "hr". This particular list gets between 8 and 40 select pieces of spam every day. These are all caught by the Privacy Option: "Must posts have list named in destination (to, cc) field" = yes === Doing it: - Delete all current requests using the web Admin. This will make the file request.db empty (for that list). - Change directory to your lists configuration directory: /home/mailman/lists/hr/ - Copy the file request.db to orig.request.db - su as mailman - Create the script /home/mailman/bin/rm_held_msgs ###### #!/bin/bash # This script removes the UCE that has accumulated for a list. # First clear out the heldmessages in ~mailman/data # Then replace the request.db in ~mailman/lists/<listname>/ with the original # # HR list: rm /home/mailman/data/heldmsg-hr-* 2> /dev/null cp /home/mailman/lists/hr/orig.request.db /home/mailman/lists/hr/request.db # other lists... ###### - Make the script executable (chmod a+x /home/mailman/bin/rm_held_msgs) - Edit crontab to have the script run hourly (crontab -e) ###### # Automatically remove held spam messages from lists like HR 59 * * * * /home/mailman/bin/rm_held_msgs ###### === The Details: Held messages are stored in ~mailman/data. You can easily read, edit, or delete them. The messages are stored in files with the name: heldmsg- <list-name> - <number> .txt. As an example held messages for hr would have names like this: heldmsg-hr-97.txt heldmsg-hr-98.txt heldmsg-hr-99.txt heldmsg-hr-100.txt These files contain individual emails that were sent to your lists. Mailman stores these files here (as a sort of queue) and sends out either an immediate message or a daily message alerting the admin of the waiting messages. Mailman will also use these held messages to load information into a database for your list. The name of this database is request.db. The amount of information Mailman loads into request.db for every message is determined by various settings in either ~mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py or Defaults.py When you browse via the web-admin and look at the waiting requests, you are accessing the request.db database and not the actual files in ~mailman/data/.. For our purposes, we just want to blank out request.db. We can probably just delete it, but I err on the side of caution and simply replace it with an empty version. I have my lists set to NOT alert me so that I only get the daily alert from Mailman (in the web-admin under General Options): Should administrator get immediate notice of new requests, as well as daily notices about collected ones" = no The Mailman alert script then runs at exactly 5:00pm every day, so I could set the script to kick off once a day at 4:59pm and I would never get bugged about held messages (for lists in my script). Instead I run the script hourly at 59 minutes past the hour. The effect is the same, I just don't like letting spam hang out on my server longer than an hour. The first active line in the script uses a redirect to get rid of warnings - should there currently be no held messages for the list. A redirect with a 2 in front of it specifically catches console warning messages: .... 2> /dev/null # sends warnings into the bit bucket === Disclaimer: The solution above is elegant only in its simplicity. I started out on Thanksgiving holiday with every intention of making an elegant hack in the Python code so that I could simply send held messages into the bit bucket, rather than have the buggers bother me with emails I darn-well *knew* I wanted deleted. However, after about 10 minutes of tracing things, the above solution occurred to me. So I wrote the script and added it to cron and was done in less than 30 minutes... It's been tested for 4 days here, and works great for me. There are a lot of solutions to the problem of dumping held-messages in Mailman. This one is mine. As with anything you get for free, use at your own risk. If you play with it and break it (even if you follow my directions), it's your own fault. Jon Carnes

1 0

feature request
by EdE Nov. 26, 2001

Nov. 26, 2001

hi, i'm using mailman for about one year at my site. during this time i realized that it would be nice to have a feature to include one or more email-adresses temporarily to the list (without the prior subscribing-stuff): example: you start a discussion and send your mail to a list and also to a non-list user (to: list(a)do.main, user(a)an.other). the replies from the listmembers now only will go back to the list, but user(a)an.other never sees them. of course you can forward all mails to him (probably with resetting the reply-to line back to the list), but that could be take a lot of time. now it would be nice if mailman recognizes the other adress in the to-line and treat user(a)an.other in this thread-context as a list member. of course this feature should be optional because it'll only be nice on non-private lists, etc. furthermore there has to be a feature to determine where the mail comes from (user or remailer), to avoid list2list bounces. nevertheless, i had this idea today and i thought this would be the right place to tell. have fun. -- :: EdE { Jabber-ID: ede<at>knup.de | Website: http://people.knup.de/~ede/ }

1 0