[Mailman-Developers] MTA interface for MM 2.1

Nigel Metheringham Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk
22 Nov 2001 10:32:28 +0000


On Wed, 2001-11-21 at 23:24, Barry A. Warsaw wrote:
> 
> >>>>> "NM" == Nigel Metheringham <Nigel.Metheringham@Vdata.co.uk> writes:
>     NM> An alternative approach might be that all addresses that are
>     NM> caught by the MTA list matching stuff are passed direct into
>     NM> the Mailman address handler, so you just invoked wrapper
>     NM> mailman-address-handler <address>
>     NM> and let the python do the magic from there on.
> 
> I've found it convenient to do a little bit of preprocessing in the
> wrapper script and knowing beforehand which alias the message is being
> delivered to.  One reason is because I don't want to force the
> wrappers to parse the email messages.  Parsing is expensive, and
> potentially error prone, and the wrapper can't gracefully handle the
> errors without a lot of complexity.  Which slows things down.  Which
> increases the possibility of mail filter timeout.  Which we definitely
> want to avoid at all costs.

Barry, what I was suggesting is that Mailman parses the address, not the
message, so a message to the list would be piped in to

	|superwrapper x@dom.ain

a join request would be passed in to

	|superwrapper x-join@dom.ain

and a VERP bounce would go to

	|superwrapper x-bounces+sub=their.dom.ain@dom.ain


For exim handling this is getting into the seriously trivial catagory,
and I would expect most other MTAs to find it easy.  The @dom.ain bit
could be optional, but might have future expansion possibilities for the
virtual domain handling some people want.

	Nigel.