Given my current situation (as rare as this situation may be), I have come to realize that an emergency broadcast feature would be an indispensable tool to have right now. Since my host made the alias change on my mailing list, but did not create the MX record for the new email, it is currently impossible to post to our mailing list via email. I can't even tell people why the list isn't working.
With an emergency broadcast feature on the website (a way to send a message to the list using the Mailman mailing list admin page), I could at least get word to everyone that the mailing list will be down until Monday.
Bill
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:55:31AM -0800, Bill Catambay wrote:
Fall back to A record(s)?
I can't even tell people why the list isn't working.
*spit* if you feel you must, and can access the web-interface, why not pull a list of subscribers, and blindly mail all of them.
Although if there are no DNS records for the list, MTAs will probably reject your pseudo-list mail as part of their checks: so whilst the mail may send, it won't necessarily be received.
I'd think using competent service providers, with prompt fix-times would be more useful.
-- ``Any person who knowingly causes a nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion is guilty of an offence....'' (Nuclear Explosions Act, 1998)
Bill Catambay wrote:
I think you misunderstood my prior post. The issue has nothing directly to do with MX records. The problem (I think) is the MX records for the domain (DNS records are for domains, not email addresses) point to servers that apparently have not been configured to relay the foo-list-mod local address to the Mailman server. This is a MTA configuration issue on the MX MTAs, not a DNS issue.
This could be done with bin/inject on the Mailman server to inject a message directly into Mailman's in/ queue bypassing the MTA, but you don't have the required access. Since you don't have the required access, I do see the need in your case, but this won't happen before MM3 if then.
You could do as Adam McGreggor suggests and just send one or more BCC type emails to the subscribers. See <http://wiki.list.org/x/aYA9>.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
We can repeat the mantra -- Mailman was *NEVER* designed to be used in a Service Provider environment, especially not with multiple customers who may have very different needs, and most especially not when the Service Provider in question doesn't actually provide any of the necessary support to go along with the software.
If I could shoot every single service provider who just threw up whatever kind of crap they thought they could make stick and make a point of avoiding all the necessary support, there would be many, many fewer crappy providers in this world.
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
The weekend crew at my ISP are general tech support (i.e., they really only handle internet connection issues). My ISP does have an Operations group which usually are pretty knowledgeable, but I they simply aren't working on the weekend.
For what it's worth, they are the best ISP I have had in 20 years (and I've been through a few). They are rated #1 in customer support in the Bay Area for a reason, and for that reason I would never find a new ISP. I'm still hopeful that they can get me through the Mailman customization I am requesting.
When I used Autoshare listserver software, it ran on my home server (a Mac), and I never had to rely on anyone for support (handled everything myself). Unfortunately, that software has not been updated in over 10 years and is no longer supported (there isn't even a version that runs on Mac OS X, only a classic version). I noticed my ISP offered mailing lists (using Mailman), and I made the move this year to migrate all my lists.
Bill
At 2:35 PM -0600 on 11/22/09, Brad Knowles wrote:
On 11/22/09 2:53 PM, Bill Catambay at andale@excaliburworld.com wrote:
Assuming you can still run servers at home with your ISP, you can run Mailman on Max OS X. While Apple provides a modified version with OS X Server, it is easy to install from source on OS X client and instructions to do so can be found in the Archived.
I am currently running Mailman 2.1.12 on Leopard (on a PPC iMac not that that will make any difference).
-- Larry Stone lstone19@stonejongleux.com http://www.stonejongleux.com/
On 22-Nov-2009, at 13:53, Bill Catambay wrote:
When I used Autoshare listserver software, it ran on my home server (a Mac), and I never had to rely on anyone for support (handled everything myself). Unfortunately, that software has not been updated in over 10 years and is no longer supported (there isn't even a version that runs on Mac OS X, only a classic version). I noticed my ISP offered mailing lists (using Mailman), and I made the move this year to migrate all my list
Run mailman on your OS X machine. Setup postfix on your OS X machine to relay via your ISP.
There you go, no muss, no fuss, and no relying on anyone else.
-- I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise, we climbed aboard their starship, we headed for the skies.
<<
On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
We can repeat the mantra -- Mailman was *NEVER* designed to be used in a Service Provider environment, especially not with multiple customers who may have very different needs, and most especially not when the Service Provider in question doesn't actually provide any of the necessary support to go along with the software.
If I could shoot every single service provider who just threw up whatever kind of crap they thought they could make stick and make a point of avoiding all the necessary support, there would be many, many fewer crappy providers in this world.
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
And I would suspect Brad, that would include most [if not all] CPanel installs. I've had three ISPs WITH CP and the CP version of MM. NONE of the ISP Tech 'levels' know [and apparently do NOT care] next to nothing about MM.
In a couple on instances I have HAD to tell Bluehost Level 3 Tech what to do THANKS to MM-users Listers [from reading their probs] with the inputs of Mark being the Godsend <VBG> !!!
Ed
Brad Knowles wrote:
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
Brad, crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
I remember a few occasion when I needed to grab the subscribers list and email everyone personally. Doing it from the main interface could be useful as an "announcement" feature, although I am unsure if it fits with what the vision of mailman is.
-- Gadi Evron, ge@linuxbox.org.
On 22-Nov-2009, at 17:14, Gadi Evron wrote:
Brad, crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
It could be useful in a very narrow set of circumstances. the question is, is it worth putting resources into such a feature for those very few times this would be useful?
My sense is that getting the list of users and sending a Bcc to them is a workable solution, but I'm not tied to that position.
-- "If I were willing to change my morals for convenience or financial gain, we wouldn't be arguing, because I'd already *be* a Republican." -- Wil Shipley
LuKreme wrote:
I'm going to go with "useful, but not useful enough to put major resources into implementing"
Maybe a nice in-between solution would be making sure the FAQ/Documentation had an entry saying "if you need to get an emergency message out and Mailman is not working, here's how to get the whole subscriber list and send a Bcc'ed mail" Anyone want to volunteer to stick that in the wiki so people can find it in the future?
(Or just write up a quick definition and email me, and I can stick it in the wiki in the appropriate place.)
Terri
Terri Oda wrote:
There is already a FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/aYA9> that gives the various ways to get a membership list. The problem is than in many if not most "Mailman is not working" cases, none of these methods will work.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Gadi Evron writes:
crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
I think that, as Mark alludes to, this feature would be harder to implement usefully than you'd think. It sounds easy, but remember, in a very large share cases where it would be useful *your mail system is already broken*. A trivial example: most of the cases where I've wanted something like it, the host was crashed, and simply not available. In other cases, it seems that Mailman is for some reason unable to send mail; why would it be more able to send mail received via HTTP than mail received by SMTP?
- Mailman aliases not working (like in my case)
- Unable to access my email, but have access to web (which is common for those of us behind corporate firewalls)
- My email is broken, but my internet it still working
However, even with these reasons, I wouldn't consider it a big deal, especially if it's difficult to implement. After my list is working again, I'll probably forget all about it. :)
At 5:48 PM +0900 on 11/23/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Bill Catambay writes:
Note that I didn't deny use cases, I said it would be hard to implement usefully. For example, in the case that the mailman aliases aren't working, people *will* reply: "when do you expect it back up?" Because the mail system is currently not working, these will come through in a batch when things are fixed. What do to about them, especially since they're completely useless in this scenario? There is also the issue of what to put in From, and things like that. Will there be one-size-fits-all solution, or will the emergency poster have to set them appropriately? In the latter case, are there traps that the poster should avoid? Do the appropriate settings depend on other list settings (eg, reply-to munging)?
At 7:32 PM +0900 on 11/23/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Well, for what it's worth, in *my* situation, all posts come to me, which I am currently just holding, including "when do you expect it back up" but really more of "thanks for all the work you do" messages. This is one of the reasons I like to moderate the list this way, as I do often get direct emails that were intended for the list, and this way I can read them and appropriately file them (i.e., they won't be going out to the list once the list is working).
As far as what to put in the FROM, I would say the name could be "Foo-list Emergency Notification", and in the FROM email would be the "foo-list" email (which, in my case, come to me), or perhaps just to the "foo-list-owner" email (which should work okay for other lists as well).
Bill Catambay wrote:
Yes, but are list admins always mailman admins or have access to the machine?
The only questions which seem relevant are:
- Is this useful enough?
- Does it fit with Mailman's vision?
- How difficult is it to implement?
-- Gadi Evron, ge@linuxbox.org.
Gadi Evron wrote:
Actually, I spoke of a possible _announcement_ feature, not an emergency feature.
I see two requests in this thread. The original appeared to be a request for a way to send a regular post to a list via the admin web interface, which would be useful in cases where for whatever reason, the list was working but email delivery to the list was not.
The second request, which might also satisfy the first if it were implemented as a web service, seems to be for a way to send a message right now to all members of a list (or all lists?) regardless of digest and nomail settings.
For reasons already mentioned by Stephen and others, I don't think the first is useful enough to justify, but the second is something we can consider for MM3.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Bill Catambay wrote:
But, I hope you understand that your specific need/situation - email delivery to the list broken by the hosting provider, by incompletely implementing your requested change in the delivery of the normal list posting address and a new 'moderator posting' address on a Friday with insufficient testing and then leaving for the weekend - is so rare as to possibly never occur again.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At 1:32 PM +0200 on 11/23/09, Gadi Evron wrote:
Actually, I spoke of a possible _announcement_ feature, not an emergency feature.
"Announcement" feature would be better, since it's not always going to be an "emergency" (and would still work in my situation).
,,,
(o o)===========oOO==(_)==OOo=============
Bill Catambay Santa Clara, CA bill.catambay@excaliburworld.com "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought."
.oooO Oooo.============( )==( )============= \ ( ) / \_) (_/
On Nov 22, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Gadi Evron wrote:
I can see that it might be a useful feature, yes.
However, the laundry list of "useful features" that could be added to Mailman is several miles long and almost as wide, and I'm not qualified to judge where on that laundry list this particular feature would/should fall -- I'll leave that to the Mailman developers, like Barry and Mark.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 09:42 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
This is just a thought, since I'm not familiar with the technical details of implementing it, but it seems to be a trend.
An ever-increasing number of software packages support the installation of 3rd party extensions, said extensions supporting the activities of installation, deactivation and removal, leaving the core system unaltered. This provides end users (mail admins in the case of Mailman) with the option of installing as few or as many "extra" features as they need or want, and offloads the task of providing everything that everyone wants from the core developers onto a wider community of peripheral developers who know how to work with the core package's extension API. Mailman has a hint of this capability already, in the withlist utility which I've used with great success to develop a program to expunge lists of clueless AOL users who complain to AOL that opt-in list posts they receive from a Mailman-served list are spam.
I have no idea how this might be implemented, but I've worked with Python a bunch and I'm seriously impressed with its power and flexibility. There's nothing that can't be done with Python except mend a broken heart and fix breakfast.
<goes off to fix breakfast ....>
--
Lindsay Haisley | "Never expect the people who caused a problem
FMP Computer Services | to solve it." - Albert Einstein
512-259-1190 |
http://www.fmp.com |
On Nov 23, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
This is a goal of Mailman 3. bin/withlist will still be there
(largely unchanged), but the intent is to also support a plugin
architecture to make it easy to extend Mailman in other ways, e.g. by
adding handlers and other elements.
-Barry
Brad Knowles writes:
That's technically true, but Mailman has grown a long list of features that make it attractive to service providers, and it comes pretty close. It is not surprising that ISPs (ab)use it. One big problem that I see is that the VARs who repackage Mailman in ISP-oriented ways (principally Cpanel and Plesk) have been unwilling to contribute back (and even the FAQ deprecating their offerings doesn't seem to faze them).[1]
AFAIK one of the goals of MM3 is to improve some of the obvious sticking points, like support for virtual hosting. That won't help people who have bad ISPs, but for people where the ISPs are trying but inexperienced, we should try to remove as many of the traps and snares as possible.
We also need to improve the administrative interface. Mark (and you, inter alia) have spent *way* too much time typing five levels of menu navigation into answers to "how do I ..." questions.
Footnotes: [1] I'm very aware that's easier said than done, and likely to be quite expensive for them to get their features into upstream Mailman, compared to a quick hack that works in their intended environment. Still, they should *try*.
On Nov 23, 2009, at 1:42, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
wrote:
Oh yeah, the UI has much room for improvement. Even having used
mailman for years I dont use the admin pages every day, so I find
myself clicking through multiple pages trying to find some setting.
On Nov 23, 2009, at 8:31 AM, LuKreme wrote:
I'd like to invite those of you who really care about the admin pages
to join the mailman-developers list and engage there. It's totally
okay if you're not a coder, as long as you're willing to provide
constructive input (use cases, etc.) to the cause.
-Barry
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:55:31AM -0800, Bill Catambay wrote:
Fall back to A record(s)?
I can't even tell people why the list isn't working.
*spit* if you feel you must, and can access the web-interface, why not pull a list of subscribers, and blindly mail all of them.
Although if there are no DNS records for the list, MTAs will probably reject your pseudo-list mail as part of their checks: so whilst the mail may send, it won't necessarily be received.
I'd think using competent service providers, with prompt fix-times would be more useful.
-- ``Any person who knowingly causes a nuclear weapon test explosion or any other nuclear explosion is guilty of an offence....'' (Nuclear Explosions Act, 1998)
Bill Catambay wrote:
I think you misunderstood my prior post. The issue has nothing directly to do with MX records. The problem (I think) is the MX records for the domain (DNS records are for domains, not email addresses) point to servers that apparently have not been configured to relay the foo-list-mod local address to the Mailman server. This is a MTA configuration issue on the MX MTAs, not a DNS issue.
This could be done with bin/inject on the Mailman server to inject a message directly into Mailman's in/ queue bypassing the MTA, but you don't have the required access. Since you don't have the required access, I do see the need in your case, but this won't happen before MM3 if then.
You could do as Adam McGreggor suggests and just send one or more BCC type emails to the subscribers. See <http://wiki.list.org/x/aYA9>.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
We can repeat the mantra -- Mailman was *NEVER* designed to be used in a Service Provider environment, especially not with multiple customers who may have very different needs, and most especially not when the Service Provider in question doesn't actually provide any of the necessary support to go along with the software.
If I could shoot every single service provider who just threw up whatever kind of crap they thought they could make stick and make a point of avoiding all the necessary support, there would be many, many fewer crappy providers in this world.
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
The weekend crew at my ISP are general tech support (i.e., they really only handle internet connection issues). My ISP does have an Operations group which usually are pretty knowledgeable, but I they simply aren't working on the weekend.
For what it's worth, they are the best ISP I have had in 20 years (and I've been through a few). They are rated #1 in customer support in the Bay Area for a reason, and for that reason I would never find a new ISP. I'm still hopeful that they can get me through the Mailman customization I am requesting.
When I used Autoshare listserver software, it ran on my home server (a Mac), and I never had to rely on anyone for support (handled everything myself). Unfortunately, that software has not been updated in over 10 years and is no longer supported (there isn't even a version that runs on Mac OS X, only a classic version). I noticed my ISP offered mailing lists (using Mailman), and I made the move this year to migrate all my lists.
Bill
At 2:35 PM -0600 on 11/22/09, Brad Knowles wrote:
On 11/22/09 2:53 PM, Bill Catambay at andale@excaliburworld.com wrote:
Assuming you can still run servers at home with your ISP, you can run Mailman on Max OS X. While Apple provides a modified version with OS X Server, it is easy to install from source on OS X client and instructions to do so can be found in the Archived.
I am currently running Mailman 2.1.12 on Leopard (on a PPC iMac not that that will make any difference).
-- Larry Stone lstone19@stonejongleux.com http://www.stonejongleux.com/
On 22-Nov-2009, at 13:53, Bill Catambay wrote:
When I used Autoshare listserver software, it ran on my home server (a Mac), and I never had to rely on anyone for support (handled everything myself). Unfortunately, that software has not been updated in over 10 years and is no longer supported (there isn't even a version that runs on Mac OS X, only a classic version). I noticed my ISP offered mailing lists (using Mailman), and I made the move this year to migrate all my list
Run mailman on your OS X machine. Setup postfix on your OS X machine to relay via your ISP.
There you go, no muss, no fuss, and no relying on anyone else.
-- I thought that they were angels, but to my surprise, we climbed aboard their starship, we headed for the skies.
<<
On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
We can repeat the mantra -- Mailman was *NEVER* designed to be used in a Service Provider environment, especially not with multiple customers who may have very different needs, and most especially not when the Service Provider in question doesn't actually provide any of the necessary support to go along with the software.
If I could shoot every single service provider who just threw up whatever kind of crap they thought they could make stick and make a point of avoiding all the necessary support, there would be many, many fewer crappy providers in this world.
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
And I would suspect Brad, that would include most [if not all] CPanel installs. I've had three ISPs WITH CP and the CP version of MM. NONE of the ISP Tech 'levels' know [and apparently do NOT care] next to nothing about MM.
In a couple on instances I have HAD to tell Bluehost Level 3 Tech what to do THANKS to MM-users Listers [from reading their probs] with the inputs of Mark being the Godsend <VBG> !!!
Ed
Brad Knowles wrote:
At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require.
Brad, crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
I remember a few occasion when I needed to grab the subscribers list and email everyone personally. Doing it from the main interface could be useful as an "announcement" feature, although I am unsure if it fits with what the vision of mailman is.
-- Gadi Evron, ge@linuxbox.org.
On 22-Nov-2009, at 17:14, Gadi Evron wrote:
Brad, crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
It could be useful in a very narrow set of circumstances. the question is, is it worth putting resources into such a feature for those very few times this would be useful?
My sense is that getting the list of users and sending a Bcc to them is a workable solution, but I'm not tied to that position.
-- "If I were willing to change my morals for convenience or financial gain, we wouldn't be arguing, because I'd already *be* a Republican." -- Wil Shipley
LuKreme wrote:
I'm going to go with "useful, but not useful enough to put major resources into implementing"
Maybe a nice in-between solution would be making sure the FAQ/Documentation had an entry saying "if you need to get an emergency message out and Mailman is not working, here's how to get the whole subscriber list and send a Bcc'ed mail" Anyone want to volunteer to stick that in the wiki so people can find it in the future?
(Or just write up a quick definition and email me, and I can stick it in the wiki in the appropriate place.)
Terri
Terri Oda wrote:
There is already a FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/aYA9> that gives the various ways to get a membership list. The problem is than in many if not most "Mailman is not working" cases, none of these methods will work.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Gadi Evron writes:
crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature?
I think that, as Mark alludes to, this feature would be harder to implement usefully than you'd think. It sounds easy, but remember, in a very large share cases where it would be useful *your mail system is already broken*. A trivial example: most of the cases where I've wanted something like it, the host was crashed, and simply not available. In other cases, it seems that Mailman is for some reason unable to send mail; why would it be more able to send mail received via HTTP than mail received by SMTP?
- Mailman aliases not working (like in my case)
- Unable to access my email, but have access to web (which is common for those of us behind corporate firewalls)
- My email is broken, but my internet it still working
However, even with these reasons, I wouldn't consider it a big deal, especially if it's difficult to implement. After my list is working again, I'll probably forget all about it. :)
At 5:48 PM +0900 on 11/23/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Bill Catambay writes:
Note that I didn't deny use cases, I said it would be hard to implement usefully. For example, in the case that the mailman aliases aren't working, people *will* reply: "when do you expect it back up?" Because the mail system is currently not working, these will come through in a batch when things are fixed. What do to about them, especially since they're completely useless in this scenario? There is also the issue of what to put in From, and things like that. Will there be one-size-fits-all solution, or will the emergency poster have to set them appropriately? In the latter case, are there traps that the poster should avoid? Do the appropriate settings depend on other list settings (eg, reply-to munging)?
At 7:32 PM +0900 on 11/23/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Well, for what it's worth, in *my* situation, all posts come to me, which I am currently just holding, including "when do you expect it back up" but really more of "thanks for all the work you do" messages. This is one of the reasons I like to moderate the list this way, as I do often get direct emails that were intended for the list, and this way I can read them and appropriately file them (i.e., they won't be going out to the list once the list is working).
As far as what to put in the FROM, I would say the name could be "Foo-list Emergency Notification", and in the FROM email would be the "foo-list" email (which, in my case, come to me), or perhaps just to the "foo-list-owner" email (which should work okay for other lists as well).
Bill Catambay wrote:
Yes, but are list admins always mailman admins or have access to the machine?
The only questions which seem relevant are:
- Is this useful enough?
- Does it fit with Mailman's vision?
- How difficult is it to implement?
-- Gadi Evron, ge@linuxbox.org.
Gadi Evron wrote:
Actually, I spoke of a possible _announcement_ feature, not an emergency feature.
I see two requests in this thread. The original appeared to be a request for a way to send a regular post to a list via the admin web interface, which would be useful in cases where for whatever reason, the list was working but email delivery to the list was not.
The second request, which might also satisfy the first if it were implemented as a web service, seems to be for a way to send a message right now to all members of a list (or all lists?) regardless of digest and nomail settings.
For reasons already mentioned by Stephen and others, I don't think the first is useful enough to justify, but the second is something we can consider for MM3.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Bill Catambay wrote:
But, I hope you understand that your specific need/situation - email delivery to the list broken by the hosting provider, by incompletely implementing your requested change in the delivery of the normal list posting address and a new 'moderator posting' address on a Friday with insufficient testing and then leaving for the weekend - is so rare as to possibly never occur again.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At 1:32 PM +0200 on 11/23/09, Gadi Evron wrote:
Actually, I spoke of a possible _announcement_ feature, not an emergency feature.
"Announcement" feature would be better, since it's not always going to be an "emergency" (and would still work in my situation).
,,,
(o o)===========oOO==(_)==OOo=============
Bill Catambay Santa Clara, CA bill.catambay@excaliburworld.com "Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen, and thinking what nobody has thought."
.oooO Oooo.============( )==( )============= \ ( ) / \_) (_/
On Nov 22, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Gadi Evron wrote:
I can see that it might be a useful feature, yes.
However, the laundry list of "useful features" that could be added to Mailman is several miles long and almost as wide, and I'm not qualified to judge where on that laundry list this particular feature would/should fall -- I'll leave that to the Mailman developers, like Barry and Mark.
-- Brad Knowles <bradknowles@shub-internet.org> LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>
On Mon, 2009-11-23 at 09:42 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
This is just a thought, since I'm not familiar with the technical details of implementing it, but it seems to be a trend.
An ever-increasing number of software packages support the installation of 3rd party extensions, said extensions supporting the activities of installation, deactivation and removal, leaving the core system unaltered. This provides end users (mail admins in the case of Mailman) with the option of installing as few or as many "extra" features as they need or want, and offloads the task of providing everything that everyone wants from the core developers onto a wider community of peripheral developers who know how to work with the core package's extension API. Mailman has a hint of this capability already, in the withlist utility which I've used with great success to develop a program to expunge lists of clueless AOL users who complain to AOL that opt-in list posts they receive from a Mailman-served list are spam.
I have no idea how this might be implemented, but I've worked with Python a bunch and I'm seriously impressed with its power and flexibility. There's nothing that can't be done with Python except mend a broken heart and fix breakfast.
<goes off to fix breakfast ....>
--
Lindsay Haisley | "Never expect the people who caused a problem
FMP Computer Services | to solve it." - Albert Einstein
512-259-1190 |
http://www.fmp.com |
On Nov 23, 2009, at 11:28 AM, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
This is a goal of Mailman 3. bin/withlist will still be there
(largely unchanged), but the intent is to also support a plugin
architecture to make it easy to extend Mailman in other ways, e.g. by
adding handlers and other elements.
-Barry
Brad Knowles writes:
That's technically true, but Mailman has grown a long list of features that make it attractive to service providers, and it comes pretty close. It is not surprising that ISPs (ab)use it. One big problem that I see is that the VARs who repackage Mailman in ISP-oriented ways (principally Cpanel and Plesk) have been unwilling to contribute back (and even the FAQ deprecating their offerings doesn't seem to faze them).[1]
AFAIK one of the goals of MM3 is to improve some of the obvious sticking points, like support for virtual hosting. That won't help people who have bad ISPs, but for people where the ISPs are trying but inexperienced, we should try to remove as many of the traps and snares as possible.
We also need to improve the administrative interface. Mark (and you, inter alia) have spent *way* too much time typing five levels of menu navigation into answers to "how do I ..." questions.
Footnotes: [1] I'm very aware that's easier said than done, and likely to be quite expensive for them to get their features into upstream Mailman, compared to a quick hack that works in their intended environment. Still, they should *try*.
On Nov 23, 2009, at 1:42, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org>
wrote:
Oh yeah, the UI has much room for improvement. Even having used
mailman for years I dont use the admin pages every day, so I find
myself clicking through multiple pages trying to find some setting.
On Nov 23, 2009, at 8:31 AM, LuKreme wrote:
I'd like to invite those of you who really care about the admin pages
to join the mailman-developers list and engage there. It's totally
okay if you're not a coder, as long as you're willing to provide
constructive input (use cases, etc.) to the cause.
-Barry
participants (12)
-
Adam McGreggor -
Barry Warsaw -
Bill Catambay -
Brad Knowles -
Gadi Evron -
Larry Stone -
Lindsay Haisley -
LuKreme -
Mark Sapiro -
Sales＠" Just Brits " -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Terri Oda