[Mailman-Developers] RE: Mailman-Developers digest, Vol 1 #344 - 4 msgs

[Ken Manheimer]

> From: "Tauren Mills" <tauren@servlets.net>
> To: <mailman-developers@python.org>, "mailman-users"
<mailman-users@python.org>
> Date: Mon, 16 Aug 1999 01:05:44 -0700
> Subject: [Mailman-Developers] RE: [Mailman-Users] Virtual Hosts -- can
mailman handle them better?
>
> 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.

It's likely that your MTA (sendmail, or whatever you're using) is doing
this, not mailman.  Try some experiments passing things directly to your
MTA claiming to originate from your virtual host, and see if they get
transformed on the way through.  If not, i'm not sure what to suggest -
i believe numerous people are using the virtual host mailman feature
successfully.

Re having mailman host multiple lists having the same list name but
different domains, i think thomas fasth's suggestion is a good one - use
separate mailman installs for separate lists.  (You'll have to work out
the MTA details to dispatch to the right mailman install according to
the domain...)

Making a single mailman handle multiple lists with the same apparent
name would take another level of indirection in the mailman code on the
maillist names, plus an option on the mailman pipe command lines.  If
you're interested, this is doable, but definitely not trivial.  I doubt
it will happen until someone directly needing it makes the effort.
 
> > 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.

It's not an instead kind of thing - it does both.  (At this point it may
be worth "getting your hands dirty" reading a bit of mailman's python
code.  In particular, the docstring for the newlist command gives you
the invocation info; there may be other questions you have that would be
answered in a similar way...)

> 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.

Clearly virtual hosting is important in the ISP world, and mailman
certainly provides some capability there.  However, we simply *can't*
aim for flawless in any of the myriad dimensions where mailman operates
- mailman has to do a lot of things well, not just any one thing.  It's
at these limits where open source, and a particularly comprehensible
implementation language like python, can be a saving grace.  There are
limits in both directions, of course...

Ken Manheimer
klm@digicool.com