[Mailman-Developers] (no subject)

[Chuq Von Rospach]

At 5:17 PM -0800 12/11/00, J C Lawrence wrote:

>   1) Is there a GPL distributed queue processing system ala IBM's MQ
>      about?  I've not been able to find one.


<http://sourceforge.net/projects/queue/>

wehn I evaluated it a while back, it wasn't stable on solaris, but it 
had the functionality I wanted.


>   2) How much interest is there in optionally supporting VERP?

strong here. I did some testing in the last week on a system that is 
effectively VERPing stuff (but written in perl), which gave me a good 
idea how to ramp it up to fast volume and get away from the DNS 
delays and SMTP stuff. it could easily turn into an optional module.

>        1) Insert MessageID headers with created values in messages
>        that don't contain any MessageID.

that's no problem, although in theory, the MTA should do it for you. 
The only way I can think of this (if everyone acts properly) 
happening is someone somehow delivering a message to Mailman that 
never touches an MTA. I'm not sure that's possible.

>        2) Detect collisions within its rather small/arbitrary
>        window, and auto-discard/reject messages subsequent messages
>        with a duplicate MessageID.  This would not a rigorous dupe
>        check, but would only check for dupes against the messages
>        already in the Mailman queue (ie received and not yet sent
>        back out).

It's not that expensive to keep a hash of message IDs, where the key 
is the Message-ID, the value is a timestamp. And, say, once a day, 
you delete records where the timestamp is older than (configurable) 
days. If you're gong ot dupe check at all, why not do it for real?

>     Any problems in messing with MessageIDs in this way?

not that I can think of.

>(MUA emitting
>     non-unique or no IDs, mail dupes, etc).

it's not the MUA that's responsible for message-iid's, it's the MTA. 
And every MTA is responsible for adding one if it finds it's missing 
in the RFCs. So the only way I can see Mailman ever seeing a message 
without a Message-ID is a local user who somehow uses a local 
delivery tool like binmail to deliver a posting wtihuout it seeing 
the local MTA, or if the local MTA is broken. Or if it's a forgery 
inserted directly into the system somehow. All of which imply the 
local system is broken or compromised, so IMHO, Mailman doens't need 
to really worry about it.l

>   4) While it seems a subtlesmall point, its bugging me.  Given user
>      account support, and messages to a given user bouncing, should
>      that user be unsubscribed from only that list, or from all
>      lists at that site?

I unsubscribe from the site. I'm sure at some point, an email sent 
from A might bounce and still be valid if sent from B, but that case 
is so rare I wouldn't think of wasting time on it, because the only 
way I can see taht happen (minus broken systems, of course) is 
someone who decides to try to unsubscribe by blocking a list, isntead 
of following the directions. And I don't see we need to write code 
into mailman to help users not follow the instructions.... (grin)

>   Where this is actually bugging me most is
>      for virtual domains and whether or not lists in a virtual
>      domains should be transparent or opaque to a bounce on a list
>      in a different virtual domain?

since we've talked about a single data store for subscriber data, I 
think you do it globally. If they really want opaqueness across 
virtual domains, run mujltiples copies of Mailman. that'll still be 
an option, after all.

>For those interested the basic model is built upon arbitrary process
>queues and pipes.

which is a nice system -- it's how I finally did my big muther list 
server, but instead of gnu queue, I'm using QPS.

-- 
Chuq Von Rospach - Plaidworks Consulting (mailto:chuqui@plaidworks.com)
Apple Mail List Gnome (mailto:chuq@apple.com)

We're visiting the relatives. Cover us.