[Mailman-Users] Error checking on bulk subscribe files

Mark Sapiro msapiro at value.net
Sat Apr 29 22:28:16 CEST 2006


Jesse Sanford wrote:
>
>I had a user move a list from another provider onto an install on my  
>system yesterday.  Instead of uploading a <CR>-delimited file with  
>one email address per line, they uploaded a tab-delimited file with a  
>tab between each address.  As an added factor, they mistakenly had  
>the interface set to send a welcome message.


What Mailman version is this?

Mass subscribe takes the input, splits it into lines and pases each
non-empty line to email.Utils.parseaddr() which returns a tuple
consisting of a real name and an email address.

When I feed parseaddr() a string of tab delimited email addresses (I
only tried 3, but I don't think that 8000 would be different), it
returns a tuple with real name = the null string and email address =
the first address in the string. Thus, I would expect this to
subscribe and notify the first address and drop the rest.


>Interestingly, the effect of this was that no one got subscribed to  
>the list because Mailman read every single address as a null email  
>address with the actual email address quoted.  Mailman then happily  
>proceeded to pass 8,000+ null-addressed welcome messages to my mail  
>server, which decided to ignore the quotes and send all the messages  
>out!


In any case, mass subscribe ultimately calls ApprovedAddMember() (one
member at a time) to add the member and send the notice (to the member
and/or admin). ApprovedAddMember validates the address and if it is
not valid or already a member, it doesn't do the add or send the
notice. In any case, it only sends the notice after successfully
adding the address and logging the fact in the subscribe log.


>Is this a bug or a feature? =)


It may be a bug in an older Mailman. It may be a bug in current
mailman, but if so, in order to reproduce it I need more detail about
the actual input.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan




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