Mailman-Users May 2022

mailman-users@python.org

19 participants
12 discussions

Using cronjob to remove and add members to a mailing list
by Jerry Barnabee 10 Aug '22

10 Aug '22

I want to be able to run a cronjob on my server that uses a php script to add new users and/or remove users from a mailing list. Not having any luck finding any simple examples. My thought is that the php script would get email addresses from a database (which I can do) and then feed them to a mailman command line to either add or remove a user. The cronjob is entered via Cpanel. Have several cronjobs that modify databases but have never tried something that would actually execute a unix command. Thanks, Pineyscripter

3 3

Mailman3 - from Whoosh to Xapian
by Kimmo L. 05 Jul '22

05 Jul '22

Hello! My idea/plan is to replace Whoosh with Xapian. So far i have added this line inside settings.py: 'ENGINE': 'xapian_backend.XapianEngine', and installed pip package: pip install xapian-haystack Put i think its not enough and im missing something. If i try to do use "mailman-web rebuild_index", then i get some error messages: File "/opt/mailman/venv/lib64/python3.9/site-packages/xapian_backend.py", line 23, in <module> import xapian ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'xapian' Any ideas what im missing ? Br, Kimmo

2 2

Problem with outlook.com
by nikos 15 Jun '22

15 Jun '22

Hello list. For some reason none of hotmail or outlook users don't receive any of our newsletter. Finally all of them auto unsubscribe. The following is an error received form protection.outlook.com: Remote Server returned '550 5.6.0 CAT.InvalidContent.Exception: ExchangeDataException, Decoding of header Subject failed+ADs- raw value: +AFs-Ps+AF0- +AD0-?iso8859-7?b?wer98fnz5yDF8OX05enh6t7yIOXq5N7r+-fPn8iDz9Oft?+AD0-; cannot handle content of message That happened since September 10th this year. Before, all received without problem. Any suggestions? Thank you in advance. Nikos.

5 9

How to wrap text in archived messages
by Mark Dale 01 Jun '22

01 Jun '22

Hi, I'm looking for a way to wrap lines in archived messages. Messages from some mail clients (eg. Gmail) have their lines wrapped to 72 chars in the archived version, while archived messages from others (eg. Thunderbird, Outlook) display unwrapped lines forcing the reader to scroll horizontally. Looking at the HTML page source -- in both cases (wrapped and unwrapped) I see the message content is enclosed by PRE tags. <HR>  <PRE> Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur ... Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud ... </PRE>  <HR> The template (article.html) contains the following: ... <HR>  %(body)s  <HR> ... From what I can figure out, the PRE tags come from .../mailman/Mailman/Archiver/HyperArch.py in a block of code lines 1290 to 1314 ... /////////////////////////////////////////// def format_article(self, article): # called from add_article # TBD: Why do the HTML formatting here and keep it in the # pipermail database? It makes more sense to do the html # formatting as the article is being written as html and toss # the data after it has been written to the archive file. lines = filter(None, article.body) # Handle <HTML> </HTML> directives if self.ALLOWHTML: self.__processbody_HTML(lines) self.__processbody_URLquote(lines) if not self.SHOWHTML and lines: lines.insert(0, '<PRE>') lines.append('</PRE>') else: # Do fancy formatting here if self.SHOWBR: lines = map(lambda x:x + "<BR>", lines) else: for i in range(0, len(lines)): s = lines[i] if s[0:1] in ' \t\n': lines[i] = '<P>' + s article.html_body = lines return article //////////////////////////// And the lines in that block that seem responsible for the PRE tags are ... lines.insert(0, '<PRE>') lines.append('</PRE>') My question is: Can those PRE tags be removed and replaced with something equivalent to PHP's "nl2br" (which inserts a line break BR in place of new line entries)? A Google search for such an equivalent gives me ... def nl2br(s): return '<br />\n'.join(s.split('\n')) With zero understanding of Python my attempts to implement this have failed so far and I may well be barking up the wrong tree completely. Any clues or pointers gratefully received. Thanks.

4 10

detecting pending subscriptions across many lists?
by Karl Berry 31 May '22

31 May '22

On lists.gnu.org, we have some 3300 mailman lists. Is there any way to know, or even probabilistically guess, which have pending subscriptions, short of running list_requests on every one? For pending messages, we can look for the presence of heldmsg-* files in the mailman data dir (/var/lib/mailman/data for us), but I've been unable to discern the existence of pending subscriptions anywhere except in config.pck. I also couldn't discern a way to grep in config.pck (which would be much faster than list_requests). Is there some sequence that will only appear with pending subscriptions? Looking at one list with a pending subscription now, I see the byte string e64d 4b07 4b05 741d 014b 5574 4110 occuring before the address that wants to subscribe, but not sure if that, or any part of it, would be a reliable thing to look for. We appear to be running mailman 2.1.29. Not sure if it is the distro version (Trisquel GNU/Linux 9.0.2) or installed from the original source, but guessing that probably doesn't matter for this. Any info greatly appreciated. --thanks, karl.

2 2

Question on outputting all lists and list owners and a process for batch disabling of lists without an owner
by John Lake 27 May '22

27 May '22

Howdy! To start with, a belated thank you is in order for Mark Sapiro –I leveraged your suggestion for batch changing list owners (in our case, changing list owner from owner “a” to owner “b” for 700 lists) from your post here: https://answers.launchpad.net/mailman/+question/111591 😊 Our security department has asked me to canvas all of our lists (4,237!)—and if a list owner value is not defined they want me to disable the list. 1. Can I combine the list_lists and list_owners commands to output both (hopefully linked) values as a .csv? 2. Is there a script that any of you have leveraged to batch disable lists without a defined owner? Thanks in advance for the assistance, I really appreciate this community as I don’t have much Linux Fu and the GNU resources and assistance have been invaluable! Best, John

4 5

Double opt-in, Question about adding people to a Mailman list
by Jayson Smith 22 May '22

22 May '22

Hi, I run a Mailman 2 list for an organization of writers with disabilities. Recently our president has become concerned that some people wanting to join the group may not be responding to the standard Mailman subscription confirmation message because, from the From: line and the subject line, they're not sure what it is and don't want to open it. I understand why the subject line needs to be what it is, so people can just reply to the message to confirm their subscription. Even more confusing is that for complicated historical reasons the name of our list has nothing to do with the name of our organization, which might confuse prospective new members further. One proposal for fixing this problem is for our secretary to confirm that a new member does want to be subscribed to our list, then use the Mailman interface to add the new member outright, without that person having to go through the confirmation process. My concern with this approach is the ever-present spam police. I know that the way Mailman works by default, where someone requests to subscribe, receives a confirmation Email, then has to take some action to confirm their subscription, is confirmed opt-in or double opt-in. My question is, if person A tells person B they want to join the list, through Email or some other method that person B can later document, then person B puts person A on the list with no further confirmation required, does this constitute confirmed/double opt-in in the eyes of anyone to whom this matters? Thanks for any thoughts, Jayson

4 4

Mailman3 installation and the Hyperkitty url
by Kimmo L. 19 May '22

19 May '22

Hello! I just installed a fresh Mailman3 together with Postorius and Hyperkitty by using this guide - https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman-suite-doc/blob/master/source/install/vir… Not sure, if this guide is up to date and contains the latest information, but at the moment everything seems to work. Please let me know if I should follow any other instruction instead. My second concern/question is about Hyperkitty and how to change the default url. At the moment default archive url is for example http://mymailman/archives/ ,but am i able to change it somehow ? For example http:/mymailman/hyperkitty/ Br, Kimmo

2 2

group mismatch
by Jon Baron 17 May '22

17 May '22

I'm sure this is a very dumb question, because I have seen several posts about it, all of which imply that there is some simple solution. I am trying to use spamassassin by running everything through /etc/procmail, and I get the following in /var/log/procmail: "Group mismatch error. Mailman expected the mail wrapper script to be executed as one of the following groups: [mail, postfix, mailman, nobody, daemon], but the system's mail server executed the mail script as group: "baron". Try tweaking the mail server to run the script as one of these groups: [mail, postfix, mailman, nobody, daemon]," The dumb question is: "What is the 'mail server'?" I thought it was sendmail, but I have no idea where "baron" comes from. baron is just a user on the system. The various IDs for mailman are set to sjdm.org in the configuration file. I installed it as "root" from a Fedora RPM, and the name "baron" had no part of that. So far as I can tell, NOTHING in this system is owned by "baron" except my own account (which is, however, included in several groups). Jon -- Jonathan Baron, Professor of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania Home page: https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~baron

9 16

What regular expressions are allowed for Mailman topics?
by Frank Thommen 14 May '22

14 May '22

Dear all, I'm trying to implement Mailman topics through regular expressions. However I'm not sure, what expression types are supported. I was trying * ^(OK|WARN|CRIT|UP|DOWN) -> * ^(OK|WARN|CRIT|UP|DOWN) \- to catch subject lines like "OK -> CRIT some text" and "UP -> DOWN some text" ecc. The regexpes above don't catch these mail, even though they should be perfectly ok according to several regular expression testers. Interestingly * ^(OK|WARN|CRIT|UP|DOWN) /does/ match, but I require the trailing " ->" to discern from other, very similar subjects. I also didn't find any reference documentation regarding the supported regular expression syntax. Is there any? Out Mailman version is 2.1.9 Cheers, Frank

4 4