Mailman 3 September 2002 - Mailman-Users

Help for a new install on Linux
by Mark Tilden 03 Oct '02

03 Oct '02

Ladies & Gents: I'm new to this, so please forgive me if these questions are basic: I've installed mailman on my linux box and it seems to be for the most part working, after some tweaking. I have run into two problems that have me stumped, however: 1. I created a test list after I installed mailman. Unfortunately, the name of the list contains spaces. That appears to cause numerous problems, including for some reason a problem with the administration interface cookie not working properly. However, the most curious, is that I can't delete the list. I've tried running the rmlist script, and it appears to work, but the mail list persists. I've tried putting the name in quotes. Any suggestions? 2. I created a second test list with no spaces in the name. It works better. However, whenever I send mail to the list server, I get a "loop back" bounce message from sendmail. Here's the message: > This is the Postfix program at host gateway.tildens.org. > > I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned > below could not be delivered to one or more destinations. > > For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster> > > If you do so, please include this problem report. You can > delete your own text from the message returned below. > > The Postfix program > > <markstestlist(a)gateway.tildens.org>: mail for gateway.tildens.org loops back to myself Can someone point me in a direction to fix this? What have I done wrong? Thank you in advance! Mark

2 1

batch updates to mail lists?
by Bob Treitman 03 Oct '02

03 Oct '02

Question: Can list administrators do batch replacements of the entire mailing list membership list? I'm considering using Mailman to distribute email newsletters to an organization whose email addresses are stored in a database. For several reasons, I don't want people (un)subscribing from Mailman; instead, I want to make sure that their email addresses are disabled in the database, and then the list administrator will replace the existing Mailman list with a completely new list generated from the database in plain text or any other format. The reasons: 1. As people are removed from the database, I need to make sure that their email addresses are removed from the Mailman list. 2. I need to minimize the administrative effort, and since we need to make the changes in the database, I would rather not duplicate the work by editing the Mailman list. -- Bob Treitman bob(a)softpro.com

2 1

"Members" vs. "Subscribers"
by Bob Weissman 02 Oct '02

02 Oct '02

This is a linguistic subtlety in the English version of Mailman. Maliman refers to list subscribers as "members," for example when rejecting a post from a "non-member" to a "members-only" list. This terminology is confusing in some circumstances. Here's why. I run lists for a professional, non-profit, organization which has dues-paying members. Not all paying members subscribe to all lists, and not all subscribers are paying members. If a dues-paying member has a posting rejected to what Mailman calls a "members-only" list, he will promptly complain to me that he is, in fact, a "member." And he's right. He's just not a *subscriber* to the list in question. In my own Mailman 2.0.11 installation, I've scoured the sources for user-visible strings and changed "member" to "subscriber" everywhere I thought it was important. I would like to suggest this become an official terminology change for future versions of Mailman. - Bob

8 8

is it possible to customize subscription success welcome message?
by Patrick Hsieh 02 Oct '02

02 Oct '02

Hello all, I've read the FAQ and can't find any idea about this. -- Patrick Hsieh <pahud(a)ezplay.tv> GPG public key http://pahud.net/pubkeys/pahudatezplay.gpg

2 3

## Mailman Questions for "FAQ"
by Fred Showker 01 Oct '02

01 Oct '02

Greetings QUESTIONS FOR MAILMAN #1 Sudden deluge of SPAM hitting the list Under the "Security" section of the ADMIN it says: "... See "forbidden" However I cannot find "forbidden" anywhere on any of the help pages or any of the other pages. Also searched the documentation and the word doesn't occur there either. Will those 'frequent' spammers be blocked if I add their domains to the block screen? How do I block them without getting a notice? Hold posts with header value matching a specified regexp. Allows you to filter out known addresses or domains that function primarily as spam providers. I do not want to "HOLD" those posts, I want them blocked and deleted without being notified. #2 Sudden deluge of "bounces" or "undeliverables" The list has been operating fine for months using this set of subscribers. Suddenly, yesterday, I get 160 "undeliverables" from known good addresses. Some of them also actually got posted. Today I get 7 more pages of bounces. #3 Bouncing Non-Subscribers I would rather "DISCARD" and delete all posts from non-subscribers and NOT get any notice of any kind. The option doesn't seem to be available. How do I do that? #4 When are duplicates deleted? If I get duplicate addresses, are they deleted immediately? #5 Remote "Unsubscribe" Is there a better way to "UNSUBSCRIBE" people using an email? It is rediculously tedious to remove people (who post a "Remove Me" to the list) by going to the member management page. If you've got a list of 50,000 subscribers, you have to first load all the initial page, then try to find the page where the address is located, then find that person to UNSUBSCRIBE them. As a side note: the interface is better than most other listservers however your comments on the "help" buttons are usually no help. They usually just repeat what was said on the main page. Many times they are cryptic, or phrased in such a way that it is unclear what option to actually pick. thanks for the help. The program seems to work okay. Thanks for reading Fred Showker Admin: The Design Cafe List: http://ellington.nmailer.com/mailman/listinfo/cafe

3 2

cron errors, no archiving, v2.1b3
by bronto 30 Sep '02

30 Sep '02

I posted a question regarding error messages last week while I was still running 2.1b2. I have just upgraded to v2.1b3 after being chastised for being tardy with updating. :') Now back to the questions - I have more info. Here's what I posted last week (the 23rd): "I'm running Mailamn v2.1b2, and just got these errors sent to my email: _________________________________________________________________________ Subject: Cron <mailman@g3> /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 44, in ? from Mailman import MailList ValueError: bad marshal data Subject: Cron <mailman@g3> /usr/bin/python2 -S /usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/mailman/cron/gate_news", line 44, in ? from Mailman import MailList File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/MailList.py", line 65, in ? from Mailman.OldStyleMemberships import OldStyleMemberships ValueError: bad marshal data __________________________________________________________________________ They came five minutes apart. The reference to "gate" suggests to me that it might have something to do with newsgroup syncing, but I'm not doing any of that." Since posting that last week, I have discovered that one of my mailing lists has stopped functioning to some degree. I had set up this particular list to be a simple personal archive of messages from another mailing list I subscribe to. It doesn't send anything, so I hadn't noticed any problems. While doing my mailman update, I discovered that no messages have been archived since the 23rd when I got the above errors. Snooping around the mailman directories, I see a ton of files (several hundred) in the qfiles/shunt directory, dated since 9/23. There are also a few dozen from 7/2, FWIW. I'm betting this isn't a coincidence, but know nothing more than that. What now? TIA Rob

1 0

"Operation not permitted" when updating aliases in Postfix.py
by Sergey A Lipnevich 30 Sep '02

30 Sep '02

Hi, My mailman installation is mostly doing fine, but every time I create a new list, I hit an error while performing os.system(update aliases db) in Postfix.py. I'm not running a secure kernel. I fact, when I do: su - mailman python -c 'import os; print os.system("<skipped>/postalias <skipped>/mailman/data/aliases");' I get "0" (zero character) in the output, which means it's OK (?). How come it can't run when a web interface is used? Naturally, my Apache is not running under mailman's uid. Thank you! Sergey, Source Mage GNU/Linux, http://www.sourcemage.org/.

1 0

Help for a new install on Linux
by Mark Tilden 30 Sep '02

30 Sep '02

Ladies & Gents: I'm new to this, so please forgive me if these questions are basic: I've installed mailman on my linux box and it seems to be for the most part working, after some tweaking. I have run into two problems that have me stumped, however: 1. I created a test list after I installed mailman. Unfortunately, the name of the list contains spaces. That appears to cause numerous problems, including for some reason a problem with the administration interface cookie not working properly. However, the most curious, is that I can't delete the list. I've tried running the rmlist script, and it appears to work, but the mail list persists. I've tried putting the name in quotes. Any suggestions? 2. I created a second test list with no spaces in the name. It works better. However, whenever I send mail to the list server, I get a "loop back" bounce message from sendmail. Here's the message: > This is the Postfix program at host gateway.tildens.org. > > I'm sorry to have to inform you that the message returned > below could not be delivered to one or more destinations. > > For further assistance, please send mail to <postmaster> > > If you do so, please include this problem report. You can > delete your own text from the message returned below. > > The Postfix program > > <markstestlist(a)gateway.tildens.org>: mail for gateway.tildens.org loops back to myself Can someone point me in a direction to fix this? What have I done wrong? Thank you in advance! Mark

2 1

Problem getting mailman to work
by Zoheb Sait 30 Sep '02

30 Sep '02

Hello, I installed mailman on my server, with the all the right flags and stuff, however mailman is not sending out any emails, no confirmation emails and not sending mail to any subscribed users. For e.g if I manually subscribe and send a message to the list, the message appears in the archives but none of the subscribed users recieve it. There is no error in the log files, and the log files also do not show any activity by mailman except for the mail from the subscribed user being sent to the wrapper (|/home/mailman../wrapper). I am not sure what the problem is, please help! Thanks in advance, zoheb

2 1

Virus Scanning
by Angel Gabriel 30 Sep '02

30 Sep '02

I am currently very pissed off. Okay, so it doesn't show via email, but I have just lost my virtual domains due to exxess mail messages being sent to people's mail boxes. Don't worry, this is NOT the fault of mail man. But the fault of some bastard virus, which is on some, maybe even all of my machines. I have no idea how, but about 150 emails got sent to my mailing list... which has in excess of 100k members, and is supposed to be used for occasional, and I mean OCCASIONAL mailouts.... so you can imagine how pissed people where when they got 'mailbombed'. Apart from being extremly embarrased, I'd like to protect my network from this type of embarrasment, the virus came as an email attachemnt, which slipped through the local virus scanners, and it takes just one idiot, that's right ONE, to release mayham on the world. I have no idea how many copies of the virus was sent out, but it had to be a LOT. What I would like to do, is to kill them at the source or distribution, ie, sendmail. How can I add virus protection to my email gateway, to stop them getting in, AND out? *** Not everyone is touched by an Angel...... and those that are, never forget the experience. ***

5 4