[Mailman-Users] creating new virtual lists

billc billc_lists at greenbuilder.com
Fri Mar 28 04:34:51 CET 2008


At 12:57 PM -0700 3/27/08, Dragon wrote:
>

>OK, you should NEVER edit Defaults.py
>
>You put any overrides of any default values in mm_cfg.py
>
>The reason for this is that Defaults.py gets overwritten on an
>upgrade of the mailman code while mm_cfg.py does not.

Got it.  I'm familiar with this type of organization from other 
software packages we run.

>That is default_member_moderation setting on the Privacy Options ->
>Sender Filters page.

Great.

>
>You will also want to look at the settings for
>member_moderation_action and member_moderation_notice while you are
there to set them as appropriate.

Thanks

At 1:04 PM -0700 3/27/08, Dragon wrote:
>billc sent the message below at 12:48 3/27/2008:
>  >At 3:12 PM -0400 3/27/08, Charles Marcus wrote:
>
>  >No, the mail is delivered to a Gmail account and pulled down from
>>there using Fetchmail and dropped into Mailman.  No CCs or BCCs.
>>
>>I *did* have to do some extra backflips with Gmail, as I currently
>>have to wait 5 days before I can recreate the correct account name  -
>>I have discusion@ set up as an email list which forwards to
>>discussion2@ until Gmail lets me out of the penalty box for having
>>just deleted an account named discussion at .   Perhaps that's where the
>>problem lies.
>>
>>Hopefully I'll be able to get that one to go away in 5 days.
>>
>---------------- End original message. ---------------------
>
>Umm... why on earth are you doing that? It sounds convoluted and
>unnecessary to me (in fact, I think it is downright weird).

Yes, i admit it is definitely convoluted and wierd.  (feel free to 
skip this section if the glaze factor sets in)

The problem stems from the fact that I'm setting this up to take over 
the function of an existing list (the previous host went out of 
business, rather quickly).  Since I didn't have Mailman set up and 
running I created a temporary list on my antiquated listserv 
software.  All mail for this domain is run through Gmail, as is mail 
for most of our other domains as we were getting absolutely pounded 
by the spambots (we caught a lot of spam, but there were so many 
bogus attempts to send mail that our servers were unable to say "go 
away" fast enough, and just the connections/rejections traffic was 
clogging our bandwidth up.  Gmail has the computational firepower to 
deal with that - we don't).  This is also the reason I'm using 
Fetchmail rather than forwarding or otherwise redirecting list mail 
to the Postfix server on the Mailman machine - shortly after I turned 
Postfix on to receive SMTP from non-localhost sources, I started 
seeing the spambots knocking on the door again.

So I created an account that forwarded list mail to the temp listserv.

After installing and testing Mailman it was time to test it with the 
real domain name and real emails.  I deleted the account and 
recreated it as a Gmail "list" (basically a forwarding - only 
account) which unlike their standard accounts has the ability to 
forward to more than one address (the temp list and the test list).

Now that the bugs are pretty much worked out with the virtual 
hosting, I went back to recreate the list account.  But Gmail 
requires a "waiting period" of 5 days before you can recreate an 
account that you've deleted.   So now I've got a temporarily messy 
and convoluted path that list mail will go through to get to Mailman:

  Gmail "list" =>  temp listserv => list members (to be discontinued soon)
	   => Gmail temp account => Fetchmail => Mailman =>list 
members (to be switched on soon)

When Gmail lets me, it'll look like this instead:

Gmail account (the list address) => Fetchmail => Mailman =>list members

>
>The list address must appear in the To: or CC: header of the e-mail
>delivered to mailman or an acceptable list alias can be present. The
>only other option is to have require_explicit_destination set to NO
>(which is not recommended).
>
>Probably the best way to deal with this in your case with this weird
>configuration is to have the gmail address you are sending to added
>to acceptable_aliases on the Privacy Options -> Recipient filters page.

Got it.  Thanks.  I've put in some acceptable aliases, and I suspect 
that'll do the trick.

And as an aside: you've got a convert on your hands.  Although I'm 
not fond of the need for multiple addresses for 
subscribe/unsubscribe/etc, there are lots of other things I DO like 
about Mailman, and I'm pretty sure that I'll be creating all my 
future lists using it - and probably moving my existing lists off the 
antiquated software as well.
-- 
Bill Christensen
<http://greenbuilder.com/contact/>

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