Mailman 3 June 2008 - Mailman-Users

Mailman Address Format
by Carlos Williams June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

I was wondering why when something is sent to a mailman alias address is the actual email address manipulated to show a different non existing address. For example, I create a mailman group "everyone" so now people can email <everyone(a)example.com> and when the users get an email from that group, they see the following header info: Return Path = <everyone-bounces(a)example.com> X-Original-To = <everyone(a)example.com> Delivered-To = <everyone(a)example.com> So when people see this, they attempt to send back to everyone-bounces(a)example.com and of course the email is rejected because that address does not exist. I as an email administrator understand how to read the header but most common users don't and almost always send to the wrong address. They become frustrated and annoyed with Mailman and want this fixed. I explain to them to not copy and paste the email address but rather to simply reply to all or reply to sender. Why does mailman do this? I don't understand the "bounce" parameter and or why it does not show its from "everyone(a)example.com". Thanks for any clarification or info on how to resolve this. -- Man your battle stations...

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archive/attachment preening
by Savoy, Jim June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

Hi all, We have 870+ mailing lists and about 20 gigs worth of stuff in the private/archives directory. I thought I would do a little spring cleaning, such as sending mail to list owners to see if they still want their lists. But I would also like to pare down the size of the archives directory, which have been allowed to grow wild, using cron jobs. Before I do that, I want to get assurance from this list that I fully understand how the archives are written. We are currently running Mailman v2.1.5 and we'll upgrade to v2.1.10 later this summer. Please confirm the assumptions I am about to make before I write the preening scripts for cron. I also want to write a bunch of scripts that look for certain information. 1) If a list is digestable and archiving was never turned on, then the archives/private/listname/index.html will contain only the originally-created file (which basically says "No messages have been posted to this list yet, so the archives are currently empty"). 2) If there is no mbox file in the /archives/private/listname.mbox directory, then the list has never had archiving turned on. 3) If a list is digestable but there is no attachments directory in /archives/private/listname, then the list has never had a message posted to it. 4) If the list is digestable, and archiving has never been turned on, then files in the archives/private/listname/attachments directory are only useful to already-existing subscribers who have digesting turned on (ie if I poll a list and it has no members subscribed as digest users, then it is safe to delete all files in the attachments tree). If all of my above assumptions are correct, my psuedo-code would do something like this: if (list is not archived and has no digest members) keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 month; if (list is not archived but does have digest members) keep stuff in attachments dir for 1 year; if (list is archived) keep stuff in attachments dir for 3 years; For the archived lists (we have about 150 of them) I will contact the owners first, to warn them that I plan to pare their archive down to 3 years max. If they protest, I will add them as an exception to the rule and skip over them during the cron job run. I know that there is more to be done with regards to reducing the size of archives (ie running arch --wipe on the editted, pared down .mbox file, but I will do that manually). For now I am mostly interesting in keeping the stuff in the attachments directories to a minimum. I realize that deleting stuff in /attachments breaks links in the archive and digest messages, but I think that is reasonable for the really old messages (provided the list owner concurs). One final question. I know that you can change a list's settings with /bin/config_list, but can you poll a list for settings? For example, you can use "/bin/list_members -d" to see which members of a list read in digest mode, but how can I find out which lists have archiving turned on? Or do I have to examine the archives/private tree to garner that kind of info? Thanks! - jim -

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sharing administrator passwords
by Laura Creighton June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

Here's the situation: I site I know has several hundred mailman mailing lists. Most lists are administed by 2 or 3 different people. Most people who administer at least one list, administer 10 or more. It is a pain to remember all the list passwords, and people are complaining that it is insecure to have them all written down. On the other hand, it is politically impossible to give out the site password. So what people _want_ is a way to log in with a password and then have mailman recognise them and make it possible for them to administer all the lists they run. I don't see any way to do this. Am I missing something, or will this require code? Laura Creighton

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high memory usage and long running time for mailman Python process
by Terrence Brannon June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

Hello, I am running Debian/etch and the user "list" has a Python process which takes up 83.2% of my memory and has been running for more than 40 minutes. My suspicion is that some sort of queue of moderator messages is very large. In fact, /var/lib/mailman/ is very large... I cannot access the administrator interface via the web: 6733 ./qfiles 21551 ./messages 60071 ./lists/asciidoc-discuss 60093 ./lists 288500 ./data 380881 . In looking through archives, I discovered I have more than 60,000 held messages for one mailing list: schemelab@li2-168:/var/lib/mailman/data$ ls -l | wc -l 64688 but for some reason attempting to discard even one is not working... it just sits there and hangs: schemelab@li2-168:/var/lib/mailman/data$ sudo ../bin/discard heldmsg-asciidoc-discuss-59527.pck Password: (no return to shell after 5 minutes)

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New install problem
by John Lieber June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

I've got a fresh new install on an Ubuntu Server 8, Mailman version 2.1.9 (installed from apt). Agent is Postfix I have the list installed and appears to be running. Mail sent to the list shows up in the archive. However the members are not receiving any mail from the lists. Checked the spam filter/bucket. I can send mail from the host... Any suggestions on where to start looking? I am up for doing the work in tracking this down but not sure where to start.

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Links in email messages are wrong. Please help
by Rick Parola June 3, 2008

June 3, 2008

I've been scratching my head on this one for a while now. I'm running mailman 1:2.1.9-7 on Debian stable, all of the links in emails to users or admin are missing a slash: "..... You can configure your mailing list at the following web page: http://domain.com/cgi-bin/mailmanadmin/test3 The web page for users of your mailing list is: http://domain.com/cgi-bin/mailmanlistinfo/test3 ....." therefore point to a 404 page :-( Where do I look for those links? -- Rick Parola RPWebworks 386-931-5013 http://www.rpwebworks.com/

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Disable monthly membership reminder
by Bill Honneus (honneus) June 2, 2008

June 2, 2008

Hi, Anyone know how I can disable the monthly membership reminder email that gets sent out to all members of a mailing list? Thanks, Bill

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Problem with 2.1.9 acceptable_aliases
by b19141＠anl.gov June 2, 2008

June 2, 2008

Barry Finkel wrote: >>> There was a posting to a number of lists here yesterday >>> >>> To: comp_info+cats+noc(a)example.com >>> >>> all of the lists are linked; some of the lists are subscribed to others. >>> I took that address and added it to >>> >>> acceptable_aliases And Mark Sapiro replied: >>What did you add to acceptable_aliases? And for which list(s)? >> >>A post addressed to comp_info+cats+noc(a)example.com will presumably be >>delivered to the comp_info list. In order for it not to be held by that >>list, you need either >> >>comp_info+cats+noc(a)example.com >> >>or a regexp like >> >>^comp_info(\+[^@]*)?@example.com >> >>in the acceptable_aliases of the comp_info list. Then if other lists are >>members of the comp_info list, you need the same thing in >>acceptabale_aliases of those other lists to prevent the post from being >>held there. and I replied: >For each of the five lists for which there was a posting held for >moderation I entered > > comp_info+cats+noc(a)example.com > >in the acceptable_aliases box on the admin web page via cut-and-paste. > >The mailling list that, I assume, is part of the distribution list for >this comp_info_cats+noc list is > > out(a)example.com > >That address is an accceptable_alias for the Mailman list > > out(a)lists.example.com > >and to that list is subscribed > > itad(a)example.com > opstr(a)lists.example.com > >In addition > > itad(a)example.com > >is an accceptable_alias for the Mailman list > > itad(a)lists.example.com > >and to that itad list is subscribed three other Mailman lists: > > ad(a)lists.anl.gov > cs(a)lists.anl.gov > us(a)lists.anl.gov > >For each of these six lists (out, itad, opstr, ad, cs, us) I had added > > comp_info+cats+noc(a)example.com > >to accceptable_aliases. > >The only thing "strange" about the string I added to acceptable_aliases >is the two "+" characters. I did not know if the plus characters were >causing problems. I ran another test: 1) I set up an e-mail alias a+b(a)anl.gov that points to an existing test list on my test Mailman 2.1.9 system. 2) Via that test list admin web page, I added a+b(a)anl.gov to the acceptable_aliases list. This address is the only entry in the list. 3) I sent test mail to a+b(a)anl.gov and the mail was sent to the moderator (i.e., me) due to "implicit destination" I have not looked at the code, and I am not an expert in regular expressions. I surmise that Mailman is treating the address as a regular expression, which matches ab(a)anl.gov aab(a)anl.gov aaab(a)anl.gov aaaab(a)anl.gov ... but does not match a+b(a)anl.gov I then changed the acceptable_aliases to a\+b(a)anl.gov and test mail was distributed. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Barry S. Finkel Computing and Information Systems Division Argonne National Laboratory Phone: +1 (630) 252-7277 9700 South Cass Avenue Facsimile:+1 (630) 252-4601 Building 222, Room D209 Internet: BSFinkel(a)anl.gov Argonne, IL 60439-4828 IBMMAIL: I1004994

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