Re: [Mailman-Developers] Feedback for mailman developers
Hi guys, I've copied 3 people who emailed me since May 2007 about this issue. I don't know any of them, they just found my post from 3 years ago on the web and wrote to me. Clearly its important to them since they emailed me about it. Guys: I encourage you to subscribe to the mailman-developers list so you can communicate your needs directly with the mailman development team. The one-click unsubscribe is a critical feature for mailman and will open up a much larger interest base. I am not proposing 1-click unsubscribe for discussion mailing lists such as this one - that would obviously cause problems with people unsubscribing each other by mistake. However a lot of organizations use mailing list software to broadcast newsletters to their membership. If users cannot unsubscribe via some kind of (simple) 1-click interface then it limits the people who can use the system and may not be CANSPAM compliant. The FSF is one organization that has been running a newsletter for a while and they have had to manually handle unsubscribe requests. Peter Brown is copied as well as RMS and may be able to respond if necessary. When many users cannot unsubscribe from an announcement list (as the FSF used mailman for) they often don't bother, instead they just hit the this is spam button. Neither the sender or receiver notices anything when this happens. For the receiver, future emails from the list go into the trash, so hitting the this is spam button accomplished their purpose. The sender doesn't realise there was a problem because they never heard from the recipient. But the mail services know (eg hotmail/gmail/yahoo/aol) and they begin to mark the IP address/domain of the sender as a spam sender. This causes future WANTED mail from that sender to go into the trash. When we were experimenting with mailman 3 years ago, we found that in fact mailman already has a bad reputation for email. We found our mail was directly going into the trash when it included mailman headers. When we modified mailman to send but hide the mailman headers, we got directly into the inbox. This testing is 3 years old, and I don't remember the specific services we were testing to, but it included one of hotmail or yahoo. While mailman continues not to support easy unsubscribe in the footers, it will continue to hamper the growth of free software, as free software organizations will not have a reliable product to mail to broadcast to interested users. This demand is evidenced by the emails I get every 2 months from people asking me for this patch due to my emails in the archives from 3 years ago. I'm not here to get into a debate - I only joined the list again to ask to have that post removed because I'm tired of responding to these requests which I cannot help with. I hope this explains my point of view. Best of luck, Adrian On 2/7/08, Barry Warsaw [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Feb 5, 2008, at 4:07 PM, Adrian Bye wrote: Hi guys (and RMS, copied), About 3 years ago I made this post: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman -developers/2005-February/017850.html As a result, I get an email every 1-2 months from people asking for an updated patch. It looks to me like there are really two separate unrelated features here. Distributing them in the same patch would make it difficult to review, discuss, test and integrate, regardless of whether they are good ideas or not. I would like to encourage you to develop your patches in a different way. I'm not making any promises about whether they would be integrated if you do this, but it would make it easier for us to look at, and I believe easier for your to maintain separately if you decide to continue to do so. I would highly recommend creating two separate Bazaar branches of the Mailman 2.1 code. Each would implement just one of your features. You could create a third branch with the whole thing if you wanted, but I don't think it would be necessary. You should then register on Launchpad and push these branches, publishing them in a live source code repository for all to see. I'm really trying to encourage this style of development. To me, patches living in a tracker is dead code. With a published, public branch, the entire process is more transparent, we can easily do a merge and test if we wanted to look at it. We can even find these branches easily via Launchpad. And you will have an easier time maintaining them, because as new revisions get pushed to Mailman 2.1 trunk, you can just merge, commit, and push to update your own branch. If you -- or anybody else -- has questions about this workflow, please ping me on #mailman on irc.freenode.net. I will happily walk you through it. Cheers, - -Barry -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.4.7 (Darwin) iD8DBQFHqvot2YZpQepbvXERAqmsAJ9H2Y9EBEIw03mDt/NPUHsL7EcYlACggzB3 pcP+bzgjF1D1dIv89m8VLCY= =BC8W -END
[Mailman-Developers] Feedback for mailman developers
Hi guys (and RMS, copied), About 3 years ago I made this post: http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman -developers/2005-February/017850.html As a result, I get an email every 1-2 months from people asking for an updated patch. I felt at the time it was an important project. I was told it was not, so I made it myself. And, it was refused to be added to the main fork of mailman which was quite frustrating. Given the volume of email requests I get about it, my opinion seems to be confirmed. I wanted to bring it to your attention, and hope something will be done about it. These are just people who are figuring out my email address on the web and contacting me. There must be many more who don't actually ask me about it. If another group wants to step up and improve mailman, it might be a good time to do so. This is a critical project which could become the centerpiece of a lot of important software if it was improved. Best regards, Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showfile=faq01.027.htp
RE: making Mailman CAN-SPAM compliant (was Re:[Mailman-Developers]Hashing member passwords in config.pck)
We need to put a freeze on new features for 2.1.6. In fact, I think we should freeze all checkins except show-stopping bug fixes. I'd like to take between now and the end of February for testing. And, I just talked with my developer, and he got quite upset about the idea of fixing his code to conform to your coding style. So I guess that won't be possible for now. I certainly understand why you have coding guidelines, I agree they are important. I would have happily paid my developer to bring his code in line with your standards. I'm disappointed; we put quite a lot of work in to get this working right, and the work we've done fits very smoothly into the our mailman installation (from an administrator perspective). I've updated the wiki page here: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showfile=faq04.039.htp Hopefully someone in the future can see what we've done and implement this properly for everyone to use. Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
RE: making Mailman CAN-SPAM compliant (was Re:[Mailman-Developers] Hashing member passwords in config.pck)
All I can say is that Mailman is a non-profit open source project, run by a group of people in whatever spare time they can manage to scrape together. The Linux folks haven't cracked the ease-of-use aspects of their OS compared to Microsoft, not even for the companies that are spending large quantities of money to try to make that happen. We're a much, much smaller group, and although this is also a smaller target, I don't see us being likely to succeed in this area where the Linux folks have not. If someone wanted to pay large sums of money to make an open source Yahoo! Groups-beating package, and pay people to work on that as their full-time job, we might be able to change this situation -- in time. Brad, We've previously had conversations about some Yahoo groups functionality which you said wasn't possible: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showfile=faq04.039.htp Yesterday I contributed patches which enables Mailman to have this exact functionality which we borrowed from Yahoo Groups. Yet I've seen no response from you yet, and only one half dismissive response from another mailman developer. Mailman CAN be as good - and better - than Yahoo Groups. It doesn't have to take lots of money and resources. Just being willing to accept our code a piece at a time, and encouraging those who contribute will go a long way towards getting there. There may be some disagreement on the unsubscribe styff, but the header/footer handling only benefits everyone. I certainly hope that the mailman team will be responsive, and accept these patches and integrate them into the codebase. From my side we'll do whatever it takes to make that happen. Just tell us what we have to do. Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
[Mailman-Developers] Html headers footers, unsubscribe
Hi guys, I have had patches made for two issues: 1. HTML headers footers handling 2. 1 click list unsubscribe You can get our patches here: https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detailaid=1121257group_id=103a tid=300103 Or also here: http://tasdevil.com/mailman_developers.zip Installation instructions are found in readme.txt What we did: 1. Reasonably good handling of HTML headers footers The issue we wanted to address is this one: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showfile=faq04.039.htp I wanted to be able to put html headers and footers into messages. I did not like the current mailman style of adding an attachment. I knew this must be possible to do because yahoo groups is doing it. So we spent a LOT of time testing how yahoo groups adds footers to mails. We tested multipart messages with varying numbers of attachments, badly formed html and a bunch of other stuff. We have documented our testing process in mime.txt. Our implementation is about 95% perfect, and works identical to yahoo groups, which is sending millions of emails/day. It will correctly handle badly formed html, and various mimetypes. Sometimes, depending on the colors of a message, it will not be possible to view the headers footers. Otherwise it works really well. 2. 1-click unsubscribe with the URL under 60 characters. I've been involved in some discussions on this topic on the developers list. The current unsubscribe process was not clear to me, and I wanted it to be very easy for my users. I also wanted the URLs to be short, so they would never get broken by various mail clients. We made some small changes to encode the users email address and listnames to the footer, along with the user password. When a user wishes to unsubscribe, they click on the link, it passes this information to mailman, and a confirmation page is then shown. The user can choose to unsubscribe by clicking on the yes, I want to unsubscribe button. I work with users who are less advanced than your average AOL customer, so both of these points were extremely important to solve. While many do feel its important to continue requiring passwords for mailman accounts, I would strongly advocate that those passwords become hidden just for access to archives. I'd like to see mailman become capable of handling millions of messages/day, and it is only when simple unsubscribe functionality is incorporated that the resources will start to appear to make that possible. Yes, this may represent some change, but I believe it can be done in a way which leaves everyone happy. Anyways, those are our modifications. If you have code questions, all coding was done by Bushmanov Efim, who can be reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED] He is available for more work of this kind if you need it, and I would highly recommend him as a great programmer. For other questions drop me a line. Cheers, Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=showamp;file=faq01.027.htp
RE: [Mailman-Developers] Hashing member passwords in config.pck
On Sat, 2005-02-12 at 05:33, Thomas Hochstein wrote: I don't think so. I'd prefer to change options *immediately*, without having to wait until I get my mail (partly via UUCP). I agree. And without passwords, you don't have to. Instead of a password to access member options, you access it via the custom URL at the footer of every message. You can either save the URL in a password storage someplace, or just refer to an older message in your mail. Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org
RE: [Mailman-Developers] Hashing member passwords in config.pck
I would suggest 'mailman 2.2' and introduce password-less membership. Most of the user operations should be done by confirmation string sent by email message. Users can optionally have their passwords which should be stored in hashed format. This would be great. As an additional note, I have had my developer make a pretty good solution for adding headers and footers in HTML. We did a _lot_ of research as to how yahoogroups implements this, and have copied their implementation. Its not 100% perfect - for example if the background color of a message is black, the headers and footers won't show properly. But it covers probably 98% of mail and successfully adds headers and footers to all kinds of multi-part mime email. It also handles badly formed email, again using the same implementation as yahoo groups. I have the patches for mailman 2.5 here, and will send them out next week so you can check them out. This will make password-less membership quite easy to implement, since it will support both html and plain text. Adrian ___ Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/archive%40jab.org
