Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman list questions about password and bounces-back for invalid emails

2014-02-28 Thread Barry S. Finkel

On 2/27/2014 1:01 PM, s7r wrote:

Hi,

I have 2 simple questions about mailman mail lists:

1). I can see there is an option to receive monthly reminder of
password, and the password is sent in plain text. Is the password in
plain text visible to the mail list owner / administrator? Or mailman
stores a secure hash of the password like sha-256 or ripemd-160? If
the password is stored in hash format, how come I can receive it
monthly in plain text?


2). If an email address works for some time but becomes suddenly
invalid (e.g. server down, domain cancelled, etc.) and when messages
are being sent to that address they bounce back with permanent
failure, will mailman remove these email addresses automatically? If
yes, after how many attempts of sending? What if the email address
server is just down for a day or something.

Thank you!

- --
s...@sky-ip.org


The answer to 2) is contained in the bounce score values that have
been set for the list.  Each subscriber has a bounce score of 0.
For each bounce, the bounce score is updated by 1, but only one
bounce a day increases the score.  When the score reaches the pre-set
limit (default 5), the subscriber is set to NOMAIL (due to bounces).
Then once per week, an e-mail is sent to the subscriber telling
him/her that the list subscription has been disabled.  If there is
no response after the third notification, then the subscriber is
unsubscribed.  Only the last bounce message is sent to the list
owner.  The list owner controls the bounce parameters.

When I was in charge of a Mailman system, I ran a bounce report
every morning so that I could see all bounce scores  0 for all
lists on the server.  I had lists built from external sources
(i.e., an HR Database), and I needed to know what addresses in the
HR Database were bad.  This report came from Mark Sapiro's
collection of useful Mailman programs.

As for passwords, I disabled the monthly password reminders.
Many of my lists were auto-subscribe lists (from HR), and the
subscriber almost never needed his/her password.  I do not remember
a case where a subscriber needed assistance with a list password.

--Barry Finkel
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Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman list questions about password and bounces-back for invalid emails

2014-02-28 Thread Adam McGreggor
On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 10:11:22AM -0600, Barry S. Finkel wrote:
 As for passwords, I disabled the monthly password reminders.
 Many of my lists were auto-subscribe lists (from HR), and the
 subscriber almost never needed his/her password.  I do not remember
 a case where a subscriber needed assistance with a list password.

+1. 

When setting up a new Mailman (2) instance, one of the things I do
is to remove that line from the crontab.

If users want a password reset, they can trigger it themselves. I've
never known anyone to think oh, I had a mail on the 1st, I'll check
that….

-- 
How can you make good ideas sound so bad?
I'm an engineer.
-- Scott Adams
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Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman list questions about password and bounces-back for invalid emails

2014-02-28 Thread Richard Damon
On 2/28/14, 12:21 PM, Adam McGreggor wrote:
 On Fri, Feb 28, 2014 at 10:11:22AM -0600, Barry S. Finkel wrote:
 As for passwords, I disabled the monthly password reminders.
 Many of my lists were auto-subscribe lists (from HR), and the
 subscriber almost never needed his/her password.  I do not remember
 a case where a subscriber needed assistance with a list password.
 +1. 

 When setting up a new Mailman (2) instance, one of the things I do
 is to remove that line from the crontab.

 If users want a password reset, they can trigger it themselves. I've
 never known anyone to think oh, I had a mail on the 1st, I'll check
 that….

Where I find it very useful is when subscribers forget what address they
are subscribed with. Now and then someone forgets that they have a
forwarding going on, or that their mail server changed its name (but
still takes email from the old domain). This might have happened a while
in the past, but just now they are needing to log into the option page
or trying to post. Being able to refer them to the monthly subscription
reminder is very helpful for this. If it is just a domain change, I can
usually find the old address in the members list, but if someone set up
a forwarding for them that they forgot about, it isn't so easy.

-- 
Richard Damon

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[Mailman-Users] mailman list questions about password and bounces-back for invalid emails

2014-02-27 Thread s7r
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-
Hash: SHA1

Hi,

I have 2 simple questions about mailman mail lists:

1). I can see there is an option to receive monthly reminder of
password, and the password is sent in plain text. Is the password in
plain text visible to the mail list owner / administrator? Or mailman
stores a secure hash of the password like sha-256 or ripemd-160? If
the password is stored in hash format, how come I can receive it
monthly in plain text?


2). If an email address works for some time but becomes suddenly
invalid (e.g. server down, domain cancelled, etc.) and when messages
are being sent to that address they bounce back with permanent
failure, will mailman remove these email addresses automatically? If
yes, after how many attempts of sending? What if the email address
server is just down for a day or something.

Thank you!

- -- 
s...@sky-ip.org
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Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman list questions about password and bounces-back for invalid emails

2014-02-27 Thread Mark Sapiro
On 02/27/2014 11:01 AM, s7r wrote:
 
 I have 2 simple questions about mailman mail lists:
 
 1). I can see there is an option to receive monthly reminder of
 password, and the password is sent in plain text. Is the password in
 plain text visible to the mail list owner / administrator? Or mailman
 stores a secure hash of the password like sha-256 or ripemd-160? If
 the password is stored in hash format, how come I can receive it
 monthly in plain text?


List member passwords, as opposed to list owner, list moderator and site
passwords, are stored in plain text, but there is no UI for the list
owner to see them. The site admins can always see them by dumping the
list's config.pck file with Mailman's bin/dumpdb.


 2). If an email address works for some time but becomes suddenly
 invalid (e.g. server down, domain cancelled, etc.) and when messages
 are being sent to that address they bounce back with permanent
 failure, will mailman remove these email addresses automatically? If
 yes, after how many attempts of sending? What if the email address
 server is just down for a day or something.


See the list's web admin Bounce processing page for the settings that
control this and their documention (ignore what it says about soft
bounces - all failures are scored as 1.0).

-- 
Mark Sapiro m...@msapiro.netThe highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan
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