[Mailman-Developers] before next release: disable backscatter indefault installation

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 5 March 2008 18:08:39 -0500 Barry Warsaw <barry at list.org> wrote:

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> On Mar 5, 2008, at 5:33 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>
>> The one reason that I'm looking for an alternative to Mailman is the
>> lack
>> of adequate integration with MTAs, which means that there is no
>> sensible
>> thing that I can do with suspected spam. What I need to be able to
>> do is
>> reject it at SMTP time, based on list post permissions and other
>> configuations - I need to be able to query the configuration from my
>> MTA
>> (Exim).
>
> Ian, I think that alternative is going to be Mailman 3 :).
>
> How do you see Exim asking that question?  I can see several ways of
> doing it in Mailman 3.  1) you could call into a Python library that can
> answer that question;

That's doable, with a perl wrapper around a python script. The question I'd 
want to ask is "is email address a allowed to post to list b".

> 2) you could use some kind of RPC such as the REST
> api that Andrew's been talking about;

I'm not sure whether I could use that from Exim.

> 3) you could make the appropriate
> queries directly to the Mailman database, which is based on SQLite
> currently but can be anything that Storm can talk to.

That's probably the most desirable option from the point of view of 
efficiency, but I'd need to be querying a database remotely. Preferably one 
with several replicas. Would LDAP be an option? That's what we currently 
use for our user authentication. Hmm, doesn't look like it. I guess I could 
knock up a postgres cluster.

The disadvantage of this over (1) is that I'd need to replicate Mailman's 
logic in the SQL query.

> Is that the kind of thing you want to do?

The ideal thing would be if Mailman had an LMTP interface to accept 
postings, and could make decisions about accepting mail after RCTP TO.

That way, Exim could make LMTP callouts to Mailman (effectively, the HELO, 
MAIL FROM and RCPT TO sections of the L/SMTP protocol). If Mailman says, 
yes I'll accept this message for delivery, then Exim can continue.

Mailman might later reject a message based on other information, like 
attachment size, but at that point I don't mind bouncing the message. In 
fact, for list members bouncing is better than rejection because I can 
determine what I'm going to say.

> - -Barry
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-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
x3148