[Mailman-Developers] RELEASE Mailman 2.1 alpha 4

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Hi all,

Just wanted to let you know that I've released Mailman 2.1 alpha 4.
Below is the big list of changes with this release.  This will be the
last alpha release for 2.1, but this still leaves open the possibility
of a few new features in MM2.1.  I've got everything in that I intend
to get in.  If you've got a pet new feature -- and have code that
implements it -- please do remind me about it now and I'll work on
getting in what I can for the first beta.  Apologies for falling so
far behind in the mailing list traffic.

This is admittedly a bit of a rushed release.  I really wanted to get
this out before the end of the year (in my timezone at least ;).
Depending on my other real-job commitments, I'll be spending all my
spare time getting bugs fixed and moving toward the 2.1 final release.
I'm shooting for release by the Python conference in February, but I
don't know if I'll make it.

Cheers, and happy new year to you all.

I-swear-the-X-Oblique-Strategy-was-chosen-random-ly y'rs,
-Barry

-------------------- snip snip --------------------
2.1 alpha 4 (31-Dec-2001)

    - The administrative requests database page (admindb) has been
      redesigned for better usability when there are lots of held
      postings.  Changes include:
        o A summary page which groups held messages by sender email
          address.  On this page you can dispose of all the sender's
          messages in one action.  You can also view the details of
          all the sender's messages, or the details of a single
          message.  You can also add the sender to one of the list's
          sender filters.

        o A details page where you can view all messages, just those
          for a particular sender, or just a single held message.
          This details page is laid out the same as the old admindb
          page.

        o The instructions have been shorted on the summary and
          details page, with links to more detailed explanations.

    - Bounce processing
        o Mailman now keeps track of the reason a member's delivery
          has been disabled: explicitly by the administrator,
          explicitly by the user, by the system due to excessive
          bounces, or for (legacy) unknown reasons.

        o A new bounce processing algorithm has been implemented (we
          might actually understand this one ;).  When an address
          starts bouncing, the member gets a "bounce score".  Hard
          (fatal) bounces score 1.0, while soft (transient) bounces
          score 0.5.

          List administrators can specify a bounce threshold above
          which a member gets disabled.  They can also specify a time
          interval after which, if no bounces are received from the
          member, the member's bounce score is considered stale and is
          thrown away.

        o A new cron script, cron/disabled, periodically sends
          notifications to members who are bounce disabled.  After a
          certain number of warnings the member is deleted from the
          list.  List administrators can control both the number of
          notifications and the amount of time between notifications.

          Notifications include a confirmation cookie that the member
          can use to re-enable their subscription, via email or web.

        o New configuration variables to support the bounce processing
          are DEFAULT_BOUNCE_SCORE_THRESHOLD,
          DEFAULT_BOUNCE_INFO_STALE_AFTER,
          DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS,
          DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS_INTERVAL.

    - Privacy and security
        o Sender filters can now be regular expressions.  If a line
          starts with ^ it is taken as a (raw string) regular
          expression, otherwise it is a literal email address.

        o Fixes in 2.0.8 ported forward: prevent cross-site scripting
          exploits.

    - Mail delivery
        o Aliases have all been changed so that there's more
          consistency between the alias a message gets delivered to,
          and the script & queue runner that handles the message.

          I've also renamed the mail wrapper script to `mailman' from
          `wrapper' to avoid collisions with other MLM's.  You /will/
          need to regenerate your alias files with bin/genaliases, and
          you may need to update your smrsh (Sendmail) configs.a

          Bounces always go to listname-bounces now, since
          administration has been separated from bounce processing.
          listname-admin is obsolete.

        o VERP support!  This greatly improves the accuracy of bounce
          detection.  Configuration variables which control this feature
          include VERP_DELIVERY_INTERVAL, VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES,
          VERP_PASSWORD_REMINDERS, VERP_REGEXP, and VERP_FORMAT.  The
          latter two must be tuned to your MTA.

        o A new alias mailman-loop@dom.ain is added which directs all
          output to the file $prefix/data/owner-bounces.mbox.  This is
          used when sending messages to the site list owners, as the
          final fallback for bouncing messages.

        o New configuration variable POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS
          which should be set if you are using the Postfix MTA and
          want Mailman to play nice with Postfix-style virtual
          domains.

    - Miscellaneous
        o Better interoperability with Python 2.2.

        o MailList objects now record the date (in seconds since
          epoch) that they were created.  This is in a hidden
          attribute `created_at'.

        o bin/qrunner grows a -s/--subproc switch which is usually
          used only when it's started from mailmanctl.

        o bin/newlist grows a -l/--language option so that the list's
          preferred language can be set from the command line.

        o cron changes: admin reminders go out at 8am local time instead
          of 10pm local time.

    - Pipermail archiver
        o MIME attachments are scrubbed out into separate files which
          can be viewed by following a link in the original article.
          Article contains an indication of the size of the
          attachment, its type, and other useful information.

        o New script bin/cleanarch which can be used to `clean' an
          .mbox archive file by fixing unescaped embedded Unix From_
          lines.

        o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_SCRUBBER in
          Defaults.py.in which names the module that Pipermail should
          use to scrub articles of MIME attachments.

        o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_HTML_SANITIZER which
          describes how the scrubber should handle text/html
          attachments.

        o PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL has change its semantics.  It is now an
          absolute url, with the hostname and listname parts
          interpolated into it on a per-list basis.

        o Pipermail should now provide the proper character set in the
          Content-Type: header for archived articles.

    - Internationalization
        o Czech translations by Dan Ohnesorg.

        o The Hungarian charset has be fixed to be iso-8859-2.

        o The member options login page now has a language selection
          widget.

    - Building, configuration
        o email-0.96 package is required (see the misc directory).

        o New recipes for integrating Mailman and Sendmail,
          contributed by David Champion.