[Mailman-Developers] 2.1.8 documentation mismatch

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 8 June 2006 11:37:33 -0400 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

>
>> In fact, for exim, the MTA authors may have to do nothing, it might
>> just be a matter of fixing the configuration. In fact, its
>> conceivable that I could do that already, but I'd much rather know
>> that Mailman developers had some kind of commitment to solving the
>> collateral spam problem. And I'd like there to be a supported method
>> for doing that (an API). At the moment, I ask my list administrators
>> to NEVER automatically bounce (sorry, "reject") messages - and I
>> don't think that's satisfactory.
>
> I certainly agree that the entire email stack has to be defensive about
> collateral spam.  I do believe that scripts could be written that could
> help an MTA make /some/ decisions about the disposition of an email
> message lower down in that stack.  I'm not even opposed to distributing
> some with Mailman that have a proven track record, nor am I opposed to
> refactoring some code and "blessing" some APIs that make this job
> easier with some guarantees of stability across releases.  But I'm not
> going to write them. :) There really is nothing stopping anyone else
> from starting to do that now, if you think about the problem in the
> right way.

That's fair enough. I do have an idea about how to use a python script with 
Exim. I don't know enough to make it efficient, though. Maybe there's a 
problem with my python installation, or the way that I invoke it, but it 
seems that even a simple query takes four or five seconds to run:

rinka-12 # date ; /local/mailman/bin/list_members ian-test4 ; date
Thu Jun  8 16:47:09 BST 2006
foo at example.ac.uk
bar at example.ac.uk
baz at example.ac.uk
Thu Jun  8 16:47:13 BST 2006

But, it takes about 0.7 seconds to print "hello world", and truss shows a 
lot of files being opened just to get a list of members.

Now, my Exim installation makes up to about a dozen LDAP queries to deliver 
an email. The queries are cached, and my average time to deliver an email 
is a second or two - and that's including virus a spam scanning.

OK, maybe I should just get on and implement this. If Exim caches the 
results, then it's not going to be too bad.





-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex