Mailman 3 January 1999 - Mailman-Developers

Re: [Mailman-Developers] removing entries from aliases
by Stu Ekins 03 Feb '99

03 Feb '99

>On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 04:12:41PM -0800, Mark Williamson wrote: >> How difficult would it be to remove the entries from the /etc/aliases from when a list is >> removed via the rmlist command? Does anyone have code for this already? >Technically not that hard, assuming nobody touches the pieces that it >inserts (if you copy them in manually)... BUT, it'd have to be really >really really sure before I'd trust it. Honestly, I don't remove lists >often enough for this to be a problem... but it's certainly something to >think about... moreso just the overall add/delete I agree. Wouldn't it be a better idea to have a second aliases file that only mailman can modify, then have an alternative version of newaliases that concatenates the standard /etc/aliases and the mailman aliases together, before processing. That way, if it all goes pear shaped, your main aliases file is unaffected, only your mailman aliases get screwed, and if you have a backup version, you can recover. I'm sure I read somewhere about being able to do includes in alias files anyway, but I can't find the reference anyway. Or am I missing the point here? Stu. -- http://mobiles.ekins.net - Special offers on Nokia 9000 cases and personal numbers...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] thousands of subscribers
by Janne Sinkkonen 31 Jan '99

31 Jan '99

Jose Carlos Benfati <benfati(a)zzp.com.br> writes: > Hello, > > I'm considering installing mailman to serve some very big lists. The > biggest has more than 25000 members. One thing is the subscriber list, visible for subscribers themselves. It is linear, everything on one page and doesn't work well for 25000 members. Another thing is the digest format which triggers a sendmail MIME bug. Be sure to have sendmail 8.9.1 or newer, otherwise you site will explode. :) Even if your sendmail works, you're going to get annoyed messages from administrators of other sites who have an older sendmail dumping core because of your digests. These are my experiences with a list of about 1000 members. Otherwise, things have been running quite well. Load of the mailing list administrator is still quite high, because we use a strict filter catching all MIME and HTML messages. -- Janne

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Limiting copies of cross posts sent
by Harald Meland 31 Jan '99

31 Jan '99

[Christopher G. Petrilli] > On Fri, Jan 29, 1999 at 02:46:59PM -0600, Jeffrey C. Ollie wrote: > > Yes, existence of multiple SMTP daemons is a problem in that we'd have > > to provide documentation on how to modify the configuration for many > > different daemons. However doesn't this already happen? Aren't > > sendmail, exim, qmail, or whatever sufficiently different in their > > implementation that setup is already problematic? > > Dunno, at least with sendmail/postfix, it's just trivial additions to > the /etc/aliases file. I use the same ones for postfix as you would for > sendmail, absolutely, no exceptions. I THINK EXIM behaves the same > way, Once you've got the basic director and transport set up (in order to pipe things into mailman under the right UID/GID), all you need to do is add to an "aliases" file. However: If we try to communicate envelope recipients to the mailman pipe-alias command, we will have to do so in an MTA-specific way -- i.e. for the Exim case, one might do it in any of these ways: * Mailman can find the envelope recipient from the environment variables LOCAL_PART and DOMAIN. * Exim can invoke the Mailman pipe as <prefix>/mail/wrapper post test $pipe_addresses * Exim can add an Envelope-To: header to all locally delivered mail, which Mailman then could use. None of these "solutions" would of course work for neither Sendmail, Qmail nor Postfix. IOW, we don't want to do that. Besides, even if a message is delivered in a single SMTP dialog with multiple RCPT To:s, the MTA will split the local deliveries up into one pipe delivery per envelope recipient. Thus Mailman _will_ need to keep some state between deliveries. My current ideas on limiting duplicates are: * Consider message headers unreliable. They are OK for collecting "hints" as to what lists a message _probably_ has been crossposted to, but it really should be the envelope recipients that make the call. * Mailman needs some way (heuristics could probably make do for now) of determining whether some header address does correspond to a (local) mailman list or not. * Whenever a message subject to duplicate removal gets injected into Mailman, register that message for "probable pending delivery" to the header addresses corresponding to local Mailman lists. * As the MTA runs the mailman pipes for the different envelope recipients, Mailman updates the "probable pending delivery" status for that list to say "pending delivery". * Depending on how well we want to utilize the "multiple RCPT To:" SMTP performance gain, Mailman could do either of A. As soon as a list gets status "pending delivery", ship the message off to the members of that list _that hasn't already received it_. Add all new addresses to some message.have_been_sent_to status variable. B. Add all members of the list to some message.to_be_delivered_to status variable, and wait for some time (se below) before starting actual delivery. * When either all the "probably pending delivery" addresses have been converted to "pending delivery" (plus, maybe, some small additional timeout to cater for any Bcc:ed list addresses?), or after some (site-configurable) timeout is reached, do the remaining pending deliveries, and garbage-collect the message status info. The "I don't want to receive multiple copies" option should be an user option, as I, for one, *would* like to receive multiple copies. Some additional features, e.g. "Mailman shouldn't deliver list messages to addresses already in the header" (leading to pretty decent support for the "I want to send a message to this list _minus_ these addresses" case :) could be nice for those that want them. > > Another, more radical idea would be to completely replace the regular > > SMTP daemon with a SMTP daemon written in Python that integrates > > directly with MailMan. I've been considering doing that for another, > > more radical project that I have in mind. The only problem with this is > > that you have to dedicate a box to running MailMan and there would be > > some performace issues, but I guess that this would be offset by the > > ability to run MailMan on a Windows or Mac OS system. > > I'm not sure this is a plus, considering I want a REALLY reliable system > :-) I don't have a problem with someone writing a Python MTA (I've > thought about it many times) BUT... mailman can't use it, at least in my > opinion. Period. The MTA has to deal with /etc/aliases files just like > everyone else, it's a defacto-standard at this point. Huh? Are you saying that there's problems with having the "usual" MTA deal with /etc/aliases, while the "Mailman/Python" MTA keeps its "aliases" elsewhere? This is the modus operandi of at least one other pretty widespread MLM package, namely Lyris (<URL:http://www.lyris.com/>). -- Harald

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ZDNet mentions Mailman!
by Greg Stein 30 Jan '99

30 Jan '99

A little tidbit for your reading pleasure... http://www.zdnet.com/sr/stories/issue/0,4537,387506,00.html The mailman reference is about a third of the way down the article. -g -- Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

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removing entries from aliases
by Mark Williamson 30 Jan '99

30 Jan '99

How difficult would it be to remove the entries from the /etc/aliases from when a list is removed via the rmlist command? Does anyone have code for this already? regards, Mark

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Big lists
by J C Lawrence 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 17:20:04 -0500 (EST) Corbett J Klempay<cklempay(a)acm.jhu.edu> wrote: > Wow...what MTA are you planning on pairing with whatever list > manager you go with? Exim -- its what I use already for my other mailing lists (typically half a million deliveries per day). -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Re: Please stop the cross posting
by J C Lawrence 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 12:59:02 -0500 (EST) Ken Manheimer<ken(a)digicool.com> wrote: > (Proper handling of the subject line prefix was one of the first > things i did - i'm pretty sure it was before 1.0b3, maybe 1.0b1. > If i recall correctly, i implemented a slightly more stringent > strategy, only looking for the prefix early on in the subject > line, after "re:"'s, but before other text. I know it takes care > of the vast majority of cases, and i suspect it's preferable more > of the time in offbeat cases than looking for the prefix anywhere > in the subject line, but i may be wrong. There are three common caxes: 1) User thinks he's being helpful and prepends his own tag. 2) Tag comes at start of Subject: or after some Re: or Fwd variation. 3) Tag occurs one or more times in Subject body due to hand edited subject (eg: Subject: XXX (was [tag] YYY) #1 is ignorable. #2 is slightly painful in the variations. eg Notes uses a "Re: #ddd" where the ddd's are a digital count of the number of replies made from Notes. #3 needs to be checked for and the (potentially multiple) instances of the tag need to be stripped I spent a while writing C code to do all of this (except for the Notes thing -- that's on the bug list), and can provide code samples as needed. -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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Re: [Mailman-Developers] Big lists
by J C Lawrence 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

On Fri, 29 Jan 1999 09:57:22 +0100 (CET) Balazs Nagy<julian7(a)kva.hu> wrote: > Hiyas, How can I (we) set up mailman to handle big (with 25k or > more subscribers) lists? I'll chime in here with a variation: I'm chartered to start hosting a mailing list with 200K subscribers (yes, that's a fifth of a million) in the next few weeks. I would *like* to do it under Mailman (my current list server doesn't scale *that* well). Traffic will be low, probably under 20 inbound posts per day. My current small scale tests look good so far. Poking about the source looks _fair_, so far. Are there any known concerns? -- J C Lawrence Internet: claw(a)kanga.nu (Contractor) Internet: coder(a)kanga.nu ---------(*) Internet: claw(a)under.engr.sgi.com ...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...

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Limiting copies of cross posts sent
by Jeffrey C. Ollie 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

Here's one idea for limiting the number of messages sent when a message is cross-posted to multiple lists. I haven't actually tried implementing this idea yet so it may be impractical. The nice thing that I like about this method is that it doesn't require that a database of message-ids be kept. Ok, here's the idea: SMTP allows for multiple recipients to be specified for any message sent. A typical conversation would look something like this (apologies if my mailer wraps the lines): 220 python.org ESMTP Sendmail 8.9.1a/8.9.1 (klm); Fri, 29 Jan 1999 14:15:14 -0500 (EST) HELO max.ollie.clive.ia.us 250 python.org Hello IDENT:jcollie@max.ollie.clive.ia.us [161.210.214.102], pleased to meet you MAIL From: <jeff(a)ollie.clive.ia.us> 250 <jeff(a)ollie.clive.ia.us>... Sender ok RCPT To: <mailman-developers(a)python.org> 250 <mailman-developers(a)python.org>... Recipient ok RCPT To: <mailman-users(a)python.org> 250 <mailman-users(a)python.org>... Recipient ok DATA 354 Enter mail, end with "." on a line by itself <real message here> . 250 OAA18072 Message accepted for delivery Now, if you can get the SMTP daemon to invoke MailMan once and pass all of the recipients, MailMan could use that information to send one copy of the message to the union of the set of subscribers for each list. Of course MailMan would need to be changed significantly to handle this, but you wouldn't need a database. Jeff

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Re: Please stop the cross posting
by Barry A. Warsaw 29 Jan '99

29 Jan '99

>>>>> "CT" == Christian Tismer <tismer(a)appliedbiometrics.com> writes: CT> I will also propose to change Mailman to handle this CT> in a better way. My own patched version on Starship CT> never prepends the list name if it can be matched in the CT> "re" already. I thought Mailman already does this too. I'll double check. Chris, you might want to send your patches to mailman-developers(a)python.org -Barry

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