[Mailman-Developers] Mailman limitations

[Thomas Wouters]

On Sat, Feb 12, 2000 at 12:23:47PM -0800, Edward Elhauge wrote:

> I'm a fairly senior Perl programmer and would love to learn Python so now
> might be the time for me to find out if there is something the Mailman
> team needs in terms of Python programming.

Learning Python is a good idea regardless of where you are going to use it.
Dont expect it to be a lot like Perl though, it's not ;) Though I have to
say that i understand Perl a lot better since I started understanding
Python (which was about 5 minutes into the tutorial.)

The best place to start if you are already a decent programmer is the
tutorial (http://www.python.org/doc/tut/) and it'll only cost you a few
minutes to start reading it. It's short, but it's a complete introduction,
and you can play with it right away.

> What I don't like is that I can't run the lists on autopilot mode.

I'm not sure what would constitute autopilot mode. I concur that some things
in Mailman could be made more selfreliant, like bluntly refusing some
messages, but making it work right all the time is pretty hard.

> The bad thing is that I then have at least 10 messages to approve
> throughout the day. It is a real hassle. Most of these people seem to ignore
> my rejection notices; perhaps some of them don't understand the generic
> message sent back that talks about 'not posting administrative requests'
> etc, since it isn't to the point of why their post was rejected, and it
> may not be in a language they understand. Editing each message would take
> up even more of my time. Some of them may never read the mail received
> at their address.

You're right here. The rejection scheme is still a bit awkward. The default
rejection message (the textbox you can edit in the admin page) is hardcoded
in Mailman (in ~mailman/Mailman/Cgi/admindb.py, around line 230 in mailman
1.1) and the surounding email is built from the template file in templates/,
which is site-wide, not list-specific. These things _could_ be adressed by
the i18n project, though. Last I heard, Barry was busy integrating those
patches. Anybody know if the patches address this problem, in some way or
another ?

By the way, what you _could_ do, of course, is change the default templates/
text to contain info in various languages, and have the 'postheld.txt'
message, the one being sent to people if their message is forwarded to the
list maintainer, say something brutal like:

Your message has been intercepted by the list maintainer. It will probably
not be approved, unless it complies, in the eyes of the
maintainer, to the list rules stated <URL:here> <repeat in various languages>

> I feel that a lot of sites that have dropped Mailman, after giving it a try,
> might have done so because they can't run their lists on autopilot.

Oh, I dont know about that. I haven't met or heard about any people who
ditched Mailman. But most of the people i've heard about Mailman switched
from Majordomo to Mailman, and are still impressed by Mailman.

> I think was is needed is to keep these filters, but to have the option to
> have an automatic rejection message specific to the rejection reason and
> to the list. As a further refinement the message might be specifically in
> the language that the poster used.

You can't easily tell what language the poster used. You can perhaps make an
honest guess by looking at the characterset of the sent message, but it
wouldn't tell you too much.

> Furthermore there should be a database of rejects by address, so that
> persistent rejects can be put on a reject spam list at the the MTA level.

Well, the rejects do get logged. If you want to block them outside of
Mailman anyway, you can write a simple shell oneliner to give you the top X
of rejected messages (or perl or python or tcl or whatever's yer poison, of
course.)

> Let me know if these capabilities are already in Mailman or if there is
> already ongoing development along these lines. If not, I would be
> interested in working on enhancements along these lines.

The more the merrier, I always say. Mailman is great, but there is a lot of
room for improvement. I can't say for certain what parts are currently being
developped, though, I'm relatively new on this list, and a lot of
development seems to happen behind the scenes.

-- 
Thomas Wouters <thomas@xs4all.net>

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