Hello everyone, I thought I'd bring up this discussion, to see if may create any interest within the Exim community.
I am hoping that some of us have news about the current development of Mailman (the Mailing List App). What has happened is that development switched to the Mailman 3.x branch. Mailman 2.x development work stopped, but has not been EoLed although it's headed there. A couple of changes are slated for Mailman-2.1.15<http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Emailman-coders/mailman/2.1/view/head:/NEWS>, afterwhich there is likely to be no more concentration with it, according to this post by Mark Sapiro<http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/msg12561.html> . So far, Mailman 3.0b1 has been released and is undergoing testing. However, Exim, which is one of the leading MTAs is not at all part of this upcoming develeopment! It is in the light of that that I'd like to see if there are experts who feel that Exim should not be left behind when it comes to integration with Mailing List Apps such as Mailman. Yes, we can continue to rely on MM2, because it works pretty well, is very solid, but it would also be nice if we were able to walk side-by-side with Mailman, and be part of MM3, just like Postfix. Okay, I am not a developer, so what I am trying to see is whether some developers would be willing to kindly spare some of the time they give back to the community to help plug in the necessary support Exim requires to work with MM3. Some time back, I did raise the discussion, involved Barry Warsaw (BW) and Nigel Metheringham (NM) and Nigel graciously accepted "join the heckiling"and to give some advise from the sideline:) I am hereby opening the "heckiling", to see if we can make some moves towards getting to support MM3 in Exim, like the Postfix lot have. I see no support for any other MTA besides it. Here below is how the discussion went like: OW> The second part of my problem is how to integrate MM3 with Exim4. I am informed that things have greatly changed from the way Exim4 was configured OW> with MM2 (2.1.x). I am hoping that there are Exim gurus here, who have already worked on a configuration for MM3+Exim and have documented the bits OW> required for both exim.conf and mailman.cf. <BW> There are two parts to this. First, the way Exim is integrated with MM2, there's no need for alias file hacking because Exim can autodetect which mailing lists are available by looking at the config.pck files. Of course, there are no config.pck files in MM3 any more, so a new strategy is needed. Second, the preferred way to get messages into MM3 is via LMTP, so ideally, there'd be some configuration to get Exim to connect to MM3's LMTP server. It would be great to have better Exim (and Sendmail, qmail, or any other MTA) support in MM3. Let us know if you're willing and able to help! </BW> <NM> So to make this more generic:- - how can an external process detect configured lists? - preferably in a relatively non-active fashion - ie looking at the filesystem - if needed by running something to say if list x exists - what addresses does a list provide (ie list-request etc) - or is there a way of getting mailman to list all the addresses that mailman handles (ideally including domain) </NM> <BW> I think you could do it either way. In MM3, while there's no config.pck file, there still is a directory under lists/ for each mailing list. This is where things like template customizations can go, and probably more things eventually. One difference is that the directory contains the "fqdn listname" which is the same as the posting address. E.g.: $ bin/mailman info GNU Mailman 3.0.0a7+ (Where's My Thing?) Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53) [GCC 4.5.2] config file: None db url: sqlite:////home/barry/projects/mailman/3.0/var/data/mailman.db REST root url: http://localhost:8001/3.0/ REST credentials: restadmin:restpass $ bin/mailman lists 1 matching mailing lists found: [email protected] $ ls var/lists [email protected]/ You could also get this information from the REST API. Here's an example using the Python client library, but of course anything that talks HTTP and can parse JSON will work too. $ python Python 2.7.1+ (r271:86832, Apr 11 2011, 18:13:53) [GCC 4.5.2] on linux2 Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information. >>> from mailman.client import Client >>> mm = Client('http://localhost:8001/3.0', 'restadmin', 'restpass') >>> for mlist in mm.lists: ... print mlist.fqdn_listname ... [email protected] <NM> - what addresses does a list provide (ie list-request etc) - or is there a way of getting mailman to list all the addresses that mailman handles (ideally including domain) </NM> <BW> It's not wonderful, since it's primarily geared toward generating /etc/aliases files (or their mta-specific moral equivalents), but it's there. Of course, it would be easy to add any specific output format that would help Exim. This is the Postfix output: $ bin/mailman aliases -o - # AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED BY MAILMAN ON 2011-06-01 13:27:42 # # This file is generated by Mailman, and is kept in sync with the binary hash # file. YOU SHOULD NOT MANUALLY EDIT THIS FILE unless you know what you're # doing, and can keep the two files properly in sync. If you screw it up, # you're on your own. # Aliases which are visible only in the @example.com domain. [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 [email protected] lmtp:[127.0.0.1]:8024 There's currently no equivalent in the REST API, although it would be trivial to add. </BW> So hopefully, this sheds some light into what is going on. One thing I know is Barry is willing to offer every help needed by the Exim lot to bring in Exim support into MM3. What I don't know is whether there is already someone working on this. I'm welcoming ideas. -- Best regards, Odhiambo WASHINGTON, Nairobi,KE +254733744121/+254722743223 _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I can't hear you -- I'm using the scrambler. -- ## List details at https://lists.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://wiki.exim.org/
