[Mailman-Developers] RE: [Mailman-Users] Virtual Hosts -- can mailman handle them better?

[Tauren Mills]

Hi Harald,

Thanks for the details!

> > Also, if I send an email to clientlist-request@clientdomain.com with
> > the command "help", the response email comes back from
> > clientlist-request@mydomain.com.
>
> This can be configured -- see the "Host name this list prefers"
> setting on the general options page.

It is good to hear that this is already supposed to work, but this is not
what I have experienced.  I have set "Host name this list prefers" and it
still returns emails with the main domain name in them.  Maybe I have
something configured incorrectly.  I'll go poke around some more.

> However, if you have several lists with the same localpart name in
> different domains (i.e. "foobar@dom1.com" and "foobar@dom2.org"),
> you'll have to assign them different Mailman-internal names.

What do you mean by "different Mailman-internal names"?  If you meant that
the name of a mailing list can look like one thing to the "world", but can
be a unique name "internal" to Mailman, then I think I understand what you
mean.  See my notes below for more about this.

> I'd like to allow full email addresses as Mailman-internal list names
> to alleviate this.  Then, the site admin could maintain some sort of a
> webserver<->maildomain cross reference (available to Mailman), and two
> settings on the general options page would no longer be needed.

One thing that I have noticed might be a problem is that multiple domains
might want a mailing list with the same name.  For instance, we have this
mailing list:
	announce@mydomain.com

We've put this into our aliases file to handle it:
announce:                "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post announce"
announce-admin:          "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner announce"
announce-request:        "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd announce"
owner-announce:          announce-admin
announce-owner:          announce-admin

But, if a customer wanted a mailing list with the same name at their own
domain, I'm not sure what we would do.  I guess we could create a list
called "announce2", and put this in the aliases file:
announce2:                "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper post announce2"
announce2-admin:          "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailowner announce2"
announce2-request:        "|/home/mailman/mail/wrapper mailcmd announce2"
owner-announce2:          announce2-admin
announce2-owner:          announce2-admin

We would then put this into the virtusertable file:
announce@customerdomain.com         announce2
announce-admin@customerdomain.com   announce2-admin
announce-request@customerdomain.com announce2-request
owner-announce@customerdomain.com   owner-announce2
announce-owner@customerdomain.com   announce2-owner

But the problem is that the emails that get sent from Mailman would still
say "announce2@customerdomain.com" all throughout them, instead of
"announce@customerdomain.com".

Would your suggested changes solve this problem?

> This would increase the need for easy internal renaming of a list, as
> domain changes would essentially be a change in the internal list
> name.
>
> Opinions, anyone?
>
> > It also has links and email addresses throughout the email that
> > point to http://www.mydomain.com/mailman/listinfo/clientlist
>
> See the "Base URL for Mailman web interface" setting in the general
> options page.

Again, the "Base URL" setting is not working for me.  I'll experiment with
this some more.

> > Lastly, when I execute the "newlist" command, the email that gets
> > automatically sent to the administrator refers to URLs at
> > mydomain.com.  I would love to have a way to have that email refer
> > to URLs at clientdomain.com.
>
> I'm not aware of any easy solution to that problem.  Sure, we could
> add another option to the "newlist" script for specifying the list's
> default URL (and another for it's mail domain), but I don't think
> that's a particularly neat solution...

We are trying to automate as much of our system as possible.  We would love
to make it so that when a customer orders a mailing list service, it is
automatically installed and configured.  With this in mind, it would really
make sense for the newlist command to be able to accept a bunch of command
line parameters instead of stdin.

Could the newlist command at least include options on the command line for
the list's default URL and for the mail domain?  That way you wouldn't have
to muck up the stdin questions, but people who wanted more control could
have it.  It would be best if all options could be specified on the command
line and any required ones that were not specified would be asked via stdin.

> > I'm sure there are all sorts of other little things that could be
> > done to make Mailman support VirtualHosts better.  Are there ways to
> > deal with these issues?  If not, do people think that they are worth
> > adding to the product?
>
> I think better support for virtual hosts (or multiple domains, or
> whatever this kind of feature really /should/ be called :) are
> important, so my answer would definitely be yes.

I think that there are many ISPs that would absolutely love a mailing list
system like Mailman if it had virtual hosting support built right in
flawlessly (we certainly would!).  We've managed to tweak Majordomo a bit so
that it kind of works.  And now we've kind of got Mailman working too.  But
we really would like it to make our lives easier in a virtual hosting
environment, since that is pretty much all we do all day long.

> --
> Harald

Thanks again!

Tauren
tauren@servlets.net