Mailman 3 April 2026 - Mailman-Users

Spam filter anomaly
by Michael Welch April 12, 2026

April 12, 2026

Hi friends. Mailman 2.1.39, hosted by DreamHost. There's an anomaly happening in my spam filter rules: The filter rule reads: ^subject:.*spam* But it's catching the word "span" Like this, from a held message (it has also caught all the others in this thread): [1][1] Subject: RE: [RE-wrenches] Xantrex XW4548 lifespan Size: 17683 bytes Reason: Header matched regexp: ^subject:.*spam* References 1. http://lists.re-wrenches.org/admindb.cgi/re-wrenches-re-wrenches.org?msgid=…

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Re: Mailman v2 outbound DKIM?
by Macs R We April 11, 2026

April 11, 2026

> I thought I had won by setting the flag that encapsulates incoming > mail as an attachment before rebroadcasting it to the community. > I'm surprised that works for your users. When I introduced it, I > thought it would be the best way to handle it, and MUAs would quickly > learn to at least preview those when from a list, but in practice none > did. Worse, Apple Mail for iOS provided no way to get at it at all. > > Have you had complaints about needing to manually view the attachment? > My experience has been that the attachment is entirely transparent on iOS (amazingly so), and that Apple Mail may or may not show the attachment as direct text or an attachment block, which is easily clicked. My problem is that messages that recipients unwittingly never receive rarely generate any complaints at all, so my lack of complaints may actually be a bad sign. > Mailman won't do DKIM. This is really the MTA's responsibility. > That was my understanding as well... which led to much surprise when I inspected the headers of the (automatically-generated) messages I was receiving from it only to find no SPF or DKIM headings in them at all. Now, maybe this was because mine were purely intra-server transport (the only reason I was successfully receiving them in the first place), but I have thought of no way to capture and examine the copies of those messages that went out to remote users and got rejected. > The quickest way to get some protection is to figure out what the IP > address(es) of your outgoing SMTP gateway(s) is (are), and add an SPF > record specifying them as allowed to send mail for your site. Most > recipient sites will accept mail if the IP is allowed and the From > address is aligned per DMARC. > Well, sure, I was under the impression I had done all that. There is no cross-server activity going on at my end. The domain using mailman (firearmspolitics.info) is one of about eight subdomains on this host, which has ONE mail server and ONE IP address. The main server (server.wickenburg.us <http://server.wickenburg.us/> or wickenburg.us <http://wickenburg.us/>) and all its subdomains have SPF records, all identical except for an "include wickenburg.us <http://wickenburg.us/>" in firearmspolitics.info's, which I was told to add to help solve the original alignment problem with user-to-community message forwarding. mxtoolbox will happily display all the relevant records; they are the simplest forms of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records possible (given the overly baroque world of SPF/DKIM/DMARC). I think what helps complicate this is various hidden, unconfigurable cruft in the bowels of mailman... such as the fact that these automatic messages are being generated by "mailman-bounces(a)server.wickenburg.us <mailto:mailman-bounces@server.wickenburg.us>". This is no user I have defined -- had I defined it, I would have put it under firearmspolitics.info <http://firearmspolitics.info/>, not the unrelated main server name. I can't help but suspect this may be playing some part in my predicament. >

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How to determine the last time a list had any traffic?
by Johnson, Bruce E - (bjohnson) April 10, 2026

April 10, 2026

Faced with a slightly-smaller-than-augean-stables task; we have a large number of lists ( ~150) on our server (native mailman setup, not CPanel) Is there a way to identify easily the last time a list had any traffic? (our logs only go back a month or so) -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs

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mailman-loop sending mail to undesirable address
by Macs R We April 9, 2026

April 9, 2026

I tried posting this twice at the website and it appears to blackholed both times, don’t know whether it’s a new-user moderating thing or what. So apologies if this is a duplicate Hopefully, this is simple. I know nothing about the innards of Mailman -- I've been just using it as a black box for a decade and it's been working fine. Today, in the process of handling a subscriber's non-delivery complaint, I came across this error message in WHM's Mail Delivery Reports: From Address: mailman-loop(a)server.wickenburg.us Sender: Sent Time: Feb 22, 2025, 6:48:18 PM Sender Host: server.wickenburg.us Sender IP: 127.0.0.1 Authentication: unauthorized Spam Score: 0 Recipient: root(a)cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com Delivered To: Delivery User: Delivery Domain: cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com Router: reject Transport: **rejected** Out Time: Feb 22, 2025, 6:48:18 PM ID: 1tm16p-00000000BOG-aS00 Delivery Host: server.wickenburg.us Delivery IP: 127.0.0.1 Size: 0 bytes Result: The mail server could not deliver mail to root(a)cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com. The account or domain may not exist, they may be blacklisted, or missing the proper dns entries. The recipient identified is not anything I ever set up. "unifiedlayer" belongs to my hosting provider, so this may be some sort of default or unset value. I've scoured the Mailman configuration screens for anything resembling this, or any field I should have provided but left blank, and I'm buffaloed. Where is Mailman getting this value from, and how to I change it to something more useful?

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Re: Mailman v2 outbound DKIM?
by Macs R We April 7, 2026

April 7, 2026

Maddening. Mail sent by fap-bounces(a)firearmspolitics.org is entirely successful (except to spoofed incoming mail). Mail sent by mailman-bounces(a)server.wickenburg.us gets rejected by any recipient domain that cares about DMARC. Here's an excerpt of the results from the automatic April 1 "password reminder" mailing: I really don't understand what's going on, as the DMARC policies of firearmspolitics.org and server.wickenburg.us are identical (at least to my knowledge).

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Re: mailman-loop sending mail to undesirable address
by Macs R We April 7, 2026

April 7, 2026

Apologies, I just noticed my first image got pasted as a TIFF, which I realize many systems have problems displaying. As a JPEG: > On Apr 6, 2026, at 11:00 PM, Macs R We <macsrwe(a)macsrwe.com> wrote: > > While analyzing another problem, I again found a string of these messages in the log, at the time when the monthly automatic password reminder mails were being sent: > > > > > This time, I managed to locate the string "root(a)cloud-ci.unifiedlayer.com" in /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman/lists/mailman/config.pck. > > > > > This seems to be a configuration file set up by the "mailing list administration" webpages in the administrative interface for the mailing list. Thing is, I cannot find this field anywhere on any of those pages. > > I could try a meataxe approach and just patch the dratted thing, but I'd rather understand how this got there and the proper way to change it. Can anyone help? > > > >> On Feb 24, 2025, at 8:08 PM, Macs R We via Mailman-Users <mailman-users(a)python.org> wrote: >> >> I bopped around in /usr/local/cpanel/3rdparty/mailman today. I grepped for the string "unifiedlayer" and found it in only one file -- an archived or template (not live) copy of the mail archives HTML page header. I verified that the live page had the proper contents in it. I gave up the hunt as nonproductive. >> >> I found the logs in that hierarchy also, including the smtp-errors log, which indicated continual DKIM errors to gmail and some other sites; I believe I have solved the nondelivery problem by increasing the munging isolation factor from "rewrite header" to "enclose in wrapper." >> >> Thanks for your help in identifying those two wiki pages. I'm sure I will have occasion to refer to them in the future >> ------------------------------------------------------ >> Mailman-Users mailing list -- mailman-users(a)python.org >> To unsubscribe send an email to mailman-users-leave(a)python.org >> https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/mailman-users.python.org/ >> Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 >> Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 >> Searchable Archives: https://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/ >> https://mail.python.org/archives/list/mailman-users@python.org/ >> Member address: macsrwe(a)macsrwe.com >

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