Mailman 3 April 2005 - Mailman-Users

Newbie Questions
by Jason Williard 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

I just finished installing Mailman 2.1.5 with Postfix 2.2 on my system. It appears to be almost working with just a few issues that I'm hoping I could get some help resolving. 1) I created the lists while working under http://lists.pcsafe.net/mailman/. However, I would like to have them under http://lists.pcsafe.com/mailman/. When I go to the listinfo or admin the lists don't show up when I go to the .com. Is there any way to fix this without recreating the lists under the .com interface? Below are the important lines from mm_cfg.py: MTA = 'Postfix' add_virtualhost('lists.pcsafe.net', 'lists.pcsafe.com') add_virtualhost('list.pcsafe.com', 'lists.pcsafe.com') add_virtualhost('list.pcsafe.net', 'lists.pcsafe.com') POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = ['lists.pcsafe.com', 'lists.pcsafe.net', 'list.pcsafe.com', 'list.pcsafe.net'] SMTPHOST = 'mx.pcsafe.net' 2) When sending any messages to the lists, I get the following error. The Postfix program <pcsafe-users(a)pcsafe.net> (expanded from <pcsafe-users(a)lists.pcsafe.com>): maildir delivery failed: create /usr/local/mailman/qfiles/maildir/tmp/1114820818.P3390.vs01: Permission denied I have Postfix configured to deliver to Maildir/ and have added the following 2 lines to mm_cfg.py: USE_MAILDIR = Yes QRUNNERS.append(('MaildirRunner', 1)) Does anyone know what is wrong here? I have tried changing the permissions on /usr/local/mailman/qfiles/maildir to 02760 and added the user postfix to the mailman group. I also tried changing the ownership of the entire maildir folder to postfix:mailman, but this is offering the same result. --- Thank You Jason Williard

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mass subscription Mailman question
by Ron Jeffries 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

I did not find this in the FAQ. As list admin, when I use the "mass subscription" feature, what i syntax to give "real name" as well as email address. Example: for an email such as: zing(a)somehere.com if the person's name is: Scott Jackson and they work at: DorkyDorks Inc. How do I enter that info when mass subscribing? Thanks, -ron jeffries -- Occam Networks, Inc. rjeffries(a)occamnetworks.com "A project is a collection of value scheduled for realization." --David J. Anderson

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Mailman 2.1.6 release candidate 3
by Barry Warsaw 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

Release candidate 3 for Mailman 2.1.6 is now available. This fixes a late-breaking problem with RFC 2231 encoded headers containing bogus or non-existent charsets. Specifically, this release includes an updated version of the email package (2.5.6). Please try this version out as much as possible. Hopefully Tokio and I will get a 2.1.6 final out in about two weeks. -Barry https://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103&package_id=69562…

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Admin interface page problem
by Geoff Russell 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

Hi Mailpeople, I'm using mailman 2.1.4 on a Linux box (Mandrake). I have a problem when visiting the "Tend to pending moderator requests" link. See Message below. I've tried reloading the config.pck in the lists/listname directory but the problem keeps happening. All the other links work. Cheers, Geoff Russell. ----------------------------------------- Message ----------------------- 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 (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/mailman/scripts/driver", line 87, in run_main main() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py", line 166, in main if not mlist.NumRequestsPending(): File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 147, in NumRequestsPending self.__opendb() File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/ListAdmin.py", line 82, in __opendb self.__db = marshal.load(fp) MemoryError ----------------------------------------------------- 6 Fifth Ave, Home: 08 8332 5069 St Morris 5068 Office: 08 8207 2029 Adelaide Australia Email: geoff(a)austrics.com.au

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listinfo sometimes not displaying public lists?
by RT 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

I found this issue covered in mailman-developers in Nov.2000 (http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2000-November/007744.ht…), for an old version. however, I've got it in the current version and the old answer doesn't seem to be relevant. I've just installed Mailman and I have one public list. The list is normally *not* visible in mailman/info, although sometimes it is visible. However, it *is* visible at mailman/admin. The strange thing is that I can (occasionally) make it visible in mailman/listinfo by doing something unrelated (just logging in or logging out, possibly) in the admin pages, but I'm not quite sure what. Any ideas? Many thanks - RT

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archives skipping multipart/alternative
by Dan D Niles 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

One of my lists recieved a message that was multipart/mixed, with the first part being multipart/alternative. So it was something like this: multipart/mixed | +-> multipart/alternative | | | +-> text/plain (actual message in plain text) | +-> text/html (actual message in html) | +-> text/plain (a signature) When it is archived, it shows: Skipped content of type multipart/alternative

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RE: [Mailman-Users] Changing Contact Mailing Address
by Staven Bruce 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

Hi John, You are correct, I am using sendmail for the MTA. I reviewed your post and again you were correct in that I had not restarted the sendmail service after changing the aliases file and regenerating it with the 'newaliases' command. So I tried your suggestions, however my results were the same as before. After I commented out the mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman entries from my aliases file and left the aliases that pipe into /var/mailman/mail/mailman, I regenerated the aliases file and then restarted the sendmail service. However, even after all that, any mail sent to mailman(a)mydomain.com was not sent to me and seemed to disappear. I then returned to my aliases file and uncommented out the mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman entries and instead commented out the first /var/mailman/mail/mailman entry under the 'mailman' mailaing list that reads 'mailman: |/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman'. Once I did this, I regenerated the aliases file and restarted the sendmail service. At this point, any mail sent to mailman(a)mydomain.com came directly to me. My personal guess is that for whatever reason I think the 'mailman: |/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman' entry is either not refering to a valid defined alias or perphaps to an alias that is not defined at all? I'm not sure where the definition of '/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman' is, however I am going to look around. I would really appreciate any additional information you might have or suggestions you could pass along. -----Original Message----- From: John Dennis [mailto:jdennis@redhat.com] Sent: Sunday, April 24, 2005 8:46 AM To: Staven Bruce Cc: mailman-users(a)python.org Subject: RE: [Mailman-Users] Changing Contact Mailing Address On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 15:35 -0700, Staven Bruce wrote: > Ok, so I've figured my issue out, but I would really appreciate someone > explianing to me what's happening. I'm using Mailman version 2.1.5 on Red > Hat Enterprise 3.0 update 4. Originally, Mailman made two entries in > /etc/aliases under 'Mailman Aliases': > > #mailman aliases > > mailman: postmaster > mailman-owner: mailman > > However when I set up the recommended 'Mailman' site list, these two entries > were duplicated under 'Mailman Mailing List': > > #mailman mailing list > mailman: "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman post mailman" > mailman-owner: "|/var/mailman/mail/mailman owner mailman" > > As a result, /etc/aliases was complaining about having identical aliases. So > what I decided to comment out one of the duplicate entries. > > However, what I found was that if I commented out the 'mailman' entry under > the 'Mailman Aliases' section, any mail sent to mailman(a)mydomain.com > **seemed** to disappear. It wasn't sent to me, it wasn't returned and it > wasn't held in the MTA que. > > But then I found if I uncommented the 'mailman' entry under the 'Mailman > Aliases' section and commented out the 'mailman' entry under the 'Mailman > Mailng List' section, then mail sent to mailman(a)mydomain.com was delivered > to me with no problem. So, now I'm just trying to figure out why this > happens? Any ideas? It's clearly wrong to have the duplicate aliases defined. I went back to see where the original "mailman: postmaster" aliases came from because our mailman rpm does not create these. In fact, I'm pretty sure these aliases are from a much earlier version of mailman (2.0.x?). It turns out that the "setup" rpm which is responsible for installing core files installs a default version of /etc/aliases which include these deprecated mailman aliases. I have filed a bug report against setup so these aliases are not created when the system is first setup. This is the bugzilla. https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=155841 However, I'm not sure I can explain the behavior you're seeing, but here is the bottom line, the mailman:postmaster and mailman-owner:mailman should be deleted from your aliases file, the aliases that pipe into /var/mailman/mail/mailman are the ones you want to keep. You didn't say which MTA you were using, I assume its sendmail. When you were experimenting did you regenerate your aliases and restart sendmail? In any event make sure you remember to do that after you delete the bogus aliases. Although on my test machines I have the duplicate bogus mailman aliases as a result of the setup rpm I've never had a problem which is why I probably never noticed this. However, I use postfix as my MTA which might overwrite the duplicate alias with the 2nd correct version thus masking the problem, but thats just a theory. If after you delete the bogus aliases and rebuild the aliases and restart your MTA you're still having problems let me know. -- John Dennis <jdennis(a)redhat.com>

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Limitting age of held messages.
by Matt Ruzicka 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

We've got an issue with our data/ dir getting quite large due to a large number of held messages waiting for admin attention. Since we have a fair number of lists with almost as many admins I'm looking for a solution that will automatically prune down the held messages. Reading through the FAQ I found this entry that talking about deleting all held messages for a specific list. http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.012.htp This isn't quite what I'm looking for because I do not want to remove ALL message, just messages that have been sitting around unattended for a long period of time. At the end of that FAQ there is mention of a third party patch that allows you to specify how many days to hold pending messages and to automatically discard when they expires. I'm a bit wary of using a third party patch since I don't want to introduce possible complications related to upgrades or lag if there were to be a security issue with mailman itself. I do see that this patch is supposedly a revamp of another solution that runs from cron, but it has not been developed in a couple years. Is anyone else having this issue and are you using this patch or some other solution to solve this? Is there a way to solve this problem in the more recent versions of Mailman that I am not seeing? Thank you. Matthew Ruzicka - Systems Administrator Front Range Internet, Inc. matt(a)frii.net - (970) 212-0728 Got SPAM? Take back your email with MailArmory. http://www.MailArmory.com

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Sendmail: using aliases
by Randall Perry 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

> Hmmm... didn't Mailman mail you a list of commands to add to your alias > file? > I don't know anything about Mac OS, but here is what I typically get from > Mailman when I create a new list: > > franklin: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post franklin" > franklin-admin: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin franklin" > franklin-bounces: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces franklin" > franklin-confirm: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman confirm franklin" > franklin-join: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman join franklin" > franklin-leave: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman leave franklin" > franklin-owner: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman owner franklin" > franklin-request: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request franklin" > franklin-subscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe franklin" > franklin-unsubscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe > franklin" Thanks everyone for the quick response. In addition to adding the aliases above I had to create forwarding entries for each address in virtusertable, i.e.: virtusertable ------------- franklin(a)acme.com franklin aliases ------- franklin: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post franklin" Now I'm getting the error: Apr 29 10:04:45 localhost Mailman mail-wrapper: Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the mail wrapper script to be executed as group "mailman", but the system's mail server executed the mail script as group "daemon". Try tweaking the mail server to run the script as group "mailman", or re-run configure, providing the command line option `--with-mail-gid=daemon'. So, I guess I have to re-run configure? -- Randall Perry sysTame Xserve Web Hosting/Co-location Website Development/Promotion Mac Consulting/Sales http://www.systame.com/

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Installation problem: 500 internal server error
by RT 29 Apr '05

29 Apr '05

Apologies for posting an installation problem... :( I've just installed mailman, and am having a couple of problems. The first is that http://dom.ain/mailman/ returns '403 forbidden', and any other page (ie. http://dom.ain/create) returns '500 internal server error'. The INSTALL file suggests that this could be a GID/UID problem, but this doesn't seem very likely and I'm reluctant to reinstall (yet). There's nothing relevant in either /var/log (apart from the Apache logs, below), or in $prefix/logs/error. There's nothing in Apache's 'error_log', but 'cgi.log' has some interesting entries: ---- [2005-04-27 11:07:05]: uid: (mailman/mailman) gid: (mailman/mailman) cmd: create [2005-04-27 11:07:05]: directory is writable by others: (/usr/local/home/mailman/mailman-2.1.5/cgi-bin) ---- I installed as user/grp mailman/mailman, and 'check_perms' reports no problems. The cgi-bin directory in the message above is not actually 'writable by others'; its permissions are 'drwxrwsr-x'. I tried 'chmod o+w', but this made no difference (and the message in cgi.log remained the same). Any ideas? One potential problem is that I've installed this on a virtual server on which I don't have root permissions. I get an 'admin' login which has various root-like capabilities, and I think I've probably completed the root parts of the installation correctly, but I can't be sure. The server is running Linux, but I don't think it's a standard distribution; 'uname -a' returns 'Linux [mydomain] 2.4.29-hs-1'. Many thanks - RT

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