Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman running very slow
On Oct 24, 2012, at 9:52 AM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: >> That seem to be a very long time for processing a list. >> > Yes, that's a long time. If nothing has changed in your Mailman > installation, I'd guess you're looking at an issue with the SMTP server, > or possibly a network issue. A look at your mail server logs and the > timestamp data therein should give you a finer-grained look at the > timing of SMTP events associated with Mailman's outgoing posts. One thing I've found in the past is that frequently the mailing list administration and the SMTP MTA administration is done by different teams, and when one side asks the other if anything has changed the answer will frequently be "No, nothing at all". However, in many cases, there were changes made that were felt to be so minor that they were trivial and wouldn't count as "real changes". Nevertheless, many so-called "trivial" changes can frequently have impacts far above and beyond what was anticipated. I'd encourage the OP to also check out their DNS caching resolver servers, to see if they've recently had any problems or made any changes (even apparently trivial ones). > Another very useful tool for analyzing mail issues is swaks. Now that's a tool I had not heard of before. I'm assuming you mean the tool at <http://www.jetmore.org/john/code/swaks/>? -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Automated Subscription Bots Inundating List Owners With Subscription Requests
On Oct 23, 2012, at 9:28 AM, "Kalbfleisch, Gary" wrote: > As a result of this activity I have changed all lists so that confirmation is > required for all subscriptions, and only list owners can view the list of > subscribers. The confirmations don't actually solve the email bombing > problem but it will keep bogus subscriptions to a minimum. I have > implemented some iptables filters as noted previously but I have not yet > opened up the web interface externally. I have been monitoring traffic > directed to port 80 on my Mailman server and it has gone down significantly > since I put up the block. I may open it up again next week to see how my > iptables filters work. BTW, all the general speculation and conversation about CAPTCHAs, etc... notwithstanding, you do clearly have a real operational problem today. For your specific issue, I would recommend keeping your proposed solutions as relatively simple as possible, and layer them. Requiring confirmation is a good simple solution to a number of problems, as is restricting the ability to see list membership to only those people who are list owners. In my experience, KISS+layering almost always beats solutions that are complex from Day One. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Automated Subscription Bots Inundating List Owners With Subscription Requests
On Oct 23, 2012, at 8:41 AM, jdd wrote: > that said there are some real human paid to catch web site, and against that > no luck :-( There's an old axiom in the security business that no defense can stop a sufficiently motivated attacker with sufficient resources. The US Secret Service knows this all too well, as they continue to try to protect the President (whomever that might be) against assassination attempts. The "PlayThru" solution from areyouahuman.com is an interesting concept, but there are some other interesting alternatives as well. Among other things, I don't think that PlayThru would work for the visually-challenged, but then I've only read part of the FAQs so perhaps this is something they address later. One interesting concept I've seen has been to use a mathematical function that is easy to compute (on your end), but hard to reverse (on the other end). Then you do a challenge-response query and they don't even get to see the "submit" button until the calculations are complete (automated via JavaScript, of course). They could potentially hack the JavaScript, and maybe try to apply algorithms to speed up the calculations, so you have to choose carefully. Make the problem big enough, and even the biggest Google-enabled "rainbow tables" won't help, and it will be impossible to bypass with human-enabled methods. The problem there is to *AVOID* making the problem so hard that your "real" customers are also prevented from being able to post -- that would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion
On Aug 20, 2012, at 10:56 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >> More importantly, it would be much less difficult for us to support >> that part of the community, which would help reduce the support >> burden that Apple has to maintain. > > C'mon, Brad, it's *annoying* to have to support that part of the > community, but it's never been difficult. "Install Mailman from > source, OK?" That's not difficult for the likes of you or me, but I can guarantee you that doing something like installing Mailman from source is very difficult for the average OS X admin. If Apple did their part, then we could do our part to make the upgrade process relatively simple and painless, even by OS X standards -- i.e., drag-n-drop and you're done. > llvm is a key component of their strategy for Mac OS X developer > support as far as I can see. They did the same with CUPS for users. > But I don't think Mailman is a big part of their overall strategy. > They just considered it a cool thing to put in their distribution. I think Mailman was a bigger part of their overall strategy prior to Mountain Lion, but if the reports are to be believed then they eliminated the install of Mailman at the same time as they eliminated the ability to easily run a web server based on the apache2 code that is still installed. Sure, if you find the right articles on the right MacFanatic websites, you can be lead to a PrefPane that you can add to your system that will allow you to re-enable apache2, but that doesn't change the fact that apache is disabled by default and there is no standard OS-provided way to turn it back on. Been there, already done that. I think Apple is in the process of removing a lot of stuff from the Server component. As to what motivation you want to ascribe those actions to, well that's your choice. >> Yes, well -- he had the advantage that not only was he an Apple >> employee, he was also running lists.apple.com, and used Mailman to >> do it. > > Well, the real point is that as somebody running some of the biggest > most active lists in the world, he didn't use Apple's version -- he > used and advocated stock Mailman. And he didn't have a lot nice to > say about Apple server support, either. My point was more about the fact that he said the things he did, but specifically as the guy who was running lists.apple.com. No other person who works (or worked) at Apple and said the same sorts of things would be likely to carry the same kind of weight. And no one outside of Apple would be able to say the same kinds of things and have them carry the same kind of weight with people who are using OS X Server. The key is not just what he was saying, which I was taking as granted. The key is that he was saying those things as a person uniquely positioned to be able to say them and have them carry weight with the particular user community in question. > *We* can. Apple won't. As I said, we can do better. > Now, if somebody here can channel Steve Jobs and get direct access to > the top execs at Apple, maybe they could force the server people to > turn over maintenance to us. But the server division would surely > fight that with fire. At their worst, they would not have fought the effort with fire. They would have simply ignored it, and it would never have happened. However, I am starting to wonder if this kind of stuff going away is not part of an overall effort to dumb-down OS X so that it can be unified with iOS. I do recall some slips at the WWDC Keynote address where it was referred to as "iOS X" by a couple of people At least, it does make me wonder how something like Mailman could be re-written to work effectively on something like iOS. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion
On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:03 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >> Which is probably why they are so very violently opposed to having >> any GPL-encumbered code anywhere in the company. > > GCC? gdb? binutils? Make? CUPS? Mailman? And that's just the > applications I know of in the Mac OS X distribution itself; I'm sure > there are plenty of developers who use Emacs and other GNU tools in > preference to the Mac-supplied tools at Apple. Gcc & gdb are gone -- replaced by llvm. I believe that CUPS is also gone, but I may be wrong. And if another commenter on this thread is correct (I have not yet checked the Mountain Lion Server image that I have), then Mailman is also gone. And I can most definitely confirm that Apple is actively eliminating any use of GPL-based technologies or tools within the company. They even eliminated X out-of-the-box, although you can still download it from an alternative site. Of course, you could claim that was a disk space issue, but then they're no longer shipping the OS on physical media. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion
On Aug 20, 2012, at 12:18 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > It's failure to provide source code to paying customers (even if the > price was zero) that violates the GPL. If one of us is willing to buy > a server system and demand source code, they either cough up or they > suffer a rerun of the Objective-C embarrassment, and then they either > cough up anyway or they lose the right to distribute Mailman. > > Alternatively, if somebody knows somebody with a server system who's > willing to piss off Apple, the first somebody could get the second > somebody to do it. I've got a copy of Mountain Lion server (it's only $20), and the code in question is Python, so it has to be shipped as source. So, if we want their changes, it's easy enough to get them. For me, the point is more than they don't actively contribute their changes back to the project, and actively support those changes. If they actively contributed their changes back and actively supported their changes, then we could easily adapt the mainstream version of Mailman so that it would install and build in exactly the same locations with exactly the same localized changes for the platform, and then it should be trivial for people to upgrade. More importantly, it would be much less difficult for us to support that part of the community, which would help reduce the support burden that Apple has to maintain. With Xcode switching from llvm from gcc for the backend, and the way that llvm is continuing to be developed in partnership, maybe we can convince them to take a similar approach to Mailman and other open source software? > This has been done in other contexts (the cPanel Mailman patch was > outed at least once by a customer, and maybe Plesk's, too), but the > history with Apple seems to go like this: > > 1. Bug bites Mac server system's Mailman. > 2. Victim wastes time talking to Apple. By the time they realize it >is a waste of time, they're panicking. > 3. Willing to do anything, they come here and are advised to install >Mailman from source as described in our INSTALL file. (This >advice was especially effective when coming from Chuq. :-) Yes, well -- he had the advantage that not only was he an Apple employee, he was also running lists.apple.com, and used Mailman to do it. Other people working at Apple would not have nearly the same level of impact. > 4. Victim discovers there's nothing they want from the Apple version, >and by the time they've put out all the other little fires that >sprang up while they were fighting the Mailman fire, they cool off >enough to realize there's nothing to benefit *anybody* in the >Apple version, and it would be best if it just went away, so they >don't bother asking for code. ;-) That sequence of events doesn't serve anyone well -- not the customer, nor Apple, nor our community. We can do better. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion
On Aug 20, 2012, at 9:00 AM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: > My guess is that they don't put their top-flight people on either server > development or server support. I believe that they do have high quality people working on the development side, I think the issue is more on the support side. And the fact that they don't want to talk to *ANYONE* outside of the server team itself. > Apple isn't know for servers, it's niche > markets being audio recording, graphics editing and consumer desktop and > laptop systems. The irony is that they've done quite well on the server side, in the SOHO and workgroup business market. Since Snow Leopard, the server version has been much cheaper than Windows server solutions, and they don't put any limits on how many machines you can use your licensed copy of the software -- which is why I always made sure to buy the group or family license (authorized for up to five machines), even though I was only using it one two or three machines in the house. Apple's problems have historically been with the Enterprise market, as opposed to SOHO and workgroups. > I've also observed, with somewhat limited experience, > that Apple doesn't respond to complaints about bugs. People bitched and > moaned on Apple's user forum about a recent problem with video-induced > kernel panics in Lion (which I also experienced) and Apple never > responded, but the problem was fixed in a subsequent release. Apple does listen to complaints and usually does respond, in different ways to different types of complaints -- also depending on how loudly people are complaining and how many of them there are. Fixing a problem in the next release is one way they respond, another way is holding an impromptu press conference to explain why "Antennagate" is much ado about very little. However, Apple frequently does not respond in the way that most people would expect or want them to. I think a simple acknowledgement that there is a problem would go a long ways towards defusing a lot of the issues that have happened in the past. >> but if they're going to make modifications to it, they need to share >> those modifications back with us > > Doesn't their failure to do so violate the GPL? In this respect, I believe that they are probably in violation of the spirit of the GPL, but perhaps not in the letter of the law. Which is probably why they are so very violently opposed to having any GPL-encumbered code anywhere in the company. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman Problems under OSX Lion
On Aug 19, 2012, at 8:11 PM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: > There are lots of mailing lists available. Mailman is only one of them. > Apple no doubt supports _a_ mailing list, but as Apple Enterprise > Support says, one can seldom expect support from a proprietary software > vendor for software which isn't their own. This has long been a major bone of contention. We're happy to have them take our software, but if they're going to make modifications to it, they need to share those modifications back with us -- and support their mods. If they're going to ship a modified version of our software but then not provide those modifications back to us and not support their modifications, and not provide any support for what they have shipped? Well, then that makes them the bad guys -- they don't give us any way to be able to provide support to their customers, and they don't support their customers themselves. Regretfully, the Server team at Apple is well known for ignoring feedback and input from anyone else, especially anyone else in the company. But as I said, this is an old bone of contention. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Alternatives for Yahoo Groups like Web Features
On Aug 7, 2012, at 11:16 AM, Jason Glazer wrote: > a) a way for designated members to upload files that others can download A wiki could solve this problem. > b) a way for designated members to add events to a shared calendar that > anyone can see Hmm. No good shared group solutions in this space that I know of. Google lets you have a group calendar that can be shared read-only, but you want to carefully control who is allowed to make changes to it. > c) a way to conduct simple polls to gauge interest in topics SurveyMonkey and PollDaddy are two solutions in this space. I know some of the SurveyMonkey folks in SF -- they're good people. > d) a way for members to add links to a page to build up a library of good > links > > e) a way to create a FAQ page > > f) perhaps a wiki-like way to create and edit pages in a freeform basis I think a wiki would be at least a good way to solve all these problems, if not the best way. > What I am looking for are suggestions on what has worked well together with > an existing mailing list. What have others used and found easy to administer > and easy for list members to use. The problem is that you're not going to find a unified solution to all these problems. You can run separate services for different parts of the problem space, as we do for list.org -- the mailing lists are hosted at python.org (they came first), the main website is hosted on private servers that few people have access to and mirrored by the fine folks at gnu.org (among others), the wiki is hosted by Atlassian on behalf of list.org, and there are various bug tracking systems that have been tried out over the years. But those are still multiple separate services, located at various different locations, and no one person that I know of (other than maybe Barry) has had a hand in setting each of them up or is continuing to be involved in their ongoing maintenance. > Any suggestions? The biggest suggestion I'd make is to select tools based primarily on how useful they will be today and how easy they will be to administer on an ongoing basis once they are initially configured. Don't waste time "overbuying" for future capacity and features that you may not ever need, especially since that may make it less likely that the system in question actually gets launched in the first place -- witness the various bug tracking systems that we've tried to use over the years. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Gmail "features"
On Aug 8, 2012, at 11:11 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Well, unfortunately Gmail is closed-source and I don't know what the > full algorithm is. Surely Message-Id is part of it, but evidently > there are other aspects to it, or the behavior you and Brad > R. describe wouldn't happen. In the large-scale mail system design that I've done in the past, the tuple of (sender,recipient,message-id) was considered to be a pretty good index key for the mail database, albeit not a guaranteed unique key. Most greylisting implementations use a tuple of (sender,recipient,sending-IP) to determine if this particular message should be delayed or not. I even did a single-instance-store message database design that did an SHA-1 hash of the message body content to see if the message contents really were unique, and if not then you could store the headers separate from the body and for the body you could just include a pointer to the existing message body that you already have. I believe that some implementations of Microsoft Exchange implement a similar algorithm. If you wanted to go to the extreme, you could de-compose each message to the individual MIME bodyparts, and then do an SHA-1 hash on each of those. So, no matter how many copies of the latest Dilbert cartoon get mailed out, and no matter what text or other material might surround that, you'd still be able to reduce that to storing just one copy of the cartoon with multiple inbound links. On the other hand, Nick Christensen (author of "Sendmail Performance Tuning", ISBN-13: 978-0321115706) and I discovered that you would be trading more disk I/O operations in order to try to save a relatively trivial amount of disk space, and that's the exact opposite of the trade-off you want to make given the way disk storage capacities have rapidly grown while I/O capacities have been relatively stagnant. We discussed all these issues in the invited talk "Design and Implementation of Highly Scalable E-mail Systems", see <http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/papers/dihses/>. I happen to know the former SRE for gmail, but I don't think he'd be able to tell me anything useful on this subject. I really don't think that this is a disk storage issue, I think this is much more likely to be a wrong-headed idea that this kind of thing will be beneficial to the users -- after all, they know that they sent the message and that copy is sitting in the outbox, so they don't need to have another copy sitting in the inbox. And maybe for the majority of users, that decision might actually be helpful. But they need to give people a way to turn that option off, so that they don't break the ability to do debugging when testing the sending of messages to remote systems. Of course, if people are on Google Groups, then this probably isn't an issue for them. And maybe that's the other part of the problem -- maybe Google sees this "feature" as being a competitive advantage for them with combining Google Groups and gmail working better together, and they don't see the benefit of making gmail be able to play better with the rest of the world. If you think it's worthwhile, you could always try turning on personalization for the list, and then add a footer with unique information per recipient. That would cause the message-id to be unique as well as the message body, and wouldn't require any new code to be developed. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Using with a database and *without* a webserver
On Jun 29, 2012, at 1:29 PM, Geoff Shang wrote: > First, databases. We'd prefer to use PostgreSQL but I've not managed to find > any code for doing this. We can use MySQL instead. I found a guide at > http://loeki.tv/log/archives/81-Setting-up-Mailman-to-store-members-in-a-MySQL-database.html > which references files at > http://trac.rezo.net/trac/rezo/browser/Mailman/MySQLMemberAdaptor > > Is this the best approach/patch to use? Do people doing this use something > else? So far as I know, there's no official way to use an SQL database with Mailman 2, although there is the MemberAdaptor that you found which is believed to work with MySQL. If you'd like to modify the code to work with PostgreSQL instead, that would be great! Mailman 3 is intended to be the version that will officially integrate with other database technologies through standard Python interface, but it's still in early beta right now. > As for the web stuff, are there things we need the web interface for or can > we do everything via the command line? I'm thinking we probably need the web > UI for some things but don't recall exactly what. Mailman was not designed to be used exclusively from the command line. There are lots of admin functions that can't be done, or can't be easily done, without access to a web server. Of course, that web server could always be locked away and accessible only to the admins, but then you kind of defeat the purpose of a lot of the Mailman self-provisioning functionality. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Trying to install mm 3.0.0b1
On Jun 21, 2012, at 7:27 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote: >> I sent this to the dev list and didn't get any answers. It's probably >> more appropriate on this list anyway. > > Sorry, that message came in too late in my otherwise busy day to respond on > the developers list. I don't mind mm3 discussions on the users list, but > please be aware that I pay *much* more attention to the developers list these > days (sadly, while I still perfect my clone army), so that's probably the best > place to discuss it for now. Yeah, Barry is kept pretty busy by his other non-real job, being the Python FLUFL. Not to mention his other real job, which is still something I have absolutely no knowledge of whatsoever, and which made it rather difficult last night to explain my previous experience with Atlassian products to Sarah Goff-Dupont. You will definitely find more Barry-clones-in-progress on the developers list, especially as it relates to mm3. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Personalisation: how long does it take?
On Jun 18, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Andrew Hodgson wrote: > Thanks, something is wrong with the setup or the VPS I use is not running > efficiently. What MTA are you using? I am on Exim4. Postfix has some out-of-the-box settings that make it particularly well suited for the role of being an MTA for a mailing list manager like Mailman. With work, you can probably get a configuration for Exim that will perform nearly as fast for the same size of list, but Exim is designed primarily for other purposes than maximum performance. As the list grows larger, the performance gap between a well-tuned postfix configuration and a well-tuned Exim configuration is likely to grow. On the other hand, some people will find it easier to administer the Exim configuration than they would postfix. If ten minutes to send out your list is actually acceptable for you, then don't worry that someone else can get their entire list sent out in 120 seconds, even if they're the same size and they're doing all the same crypto operations. You need what is good enough for you, and you don't need to be comparing yourself to someone else. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] AOL redacts user addresses even with VERP and full personalization enabled
On Jun 18, 2012, at 12:06 PM, Larry Stone wrote: > And the problem that I'm trying to fix is that their user has violated MY TOS > regarding reporting list mail (that they subscribed to) as spam. That AOL > sent their Feedback Loop message to me is therefore part of the violation of > my terms. So whose terms ends up governing when they're in conflict? When you sign up for the feedback loop, you do so under the TOS of the feedback loop. If their user violates your TOS by reporting your list traffic as spam, that doesn't change the TOS of the feedback loop that you signed up for. Two lefts make a U-turn, not a right. ;-) > Personally, I'm not going to worry about it. I'll use them as best I can to > unsubscribe and server ban the offending subscriber. As I said, that AOL user > has violated my terms and I am entitled to deal with that violation. If AOL > were to ever call me on it, I'll worry about that then. On that subject, I agree with you. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] AOL redacts user addresses even with VERP and full personalization enabled
On Jun 17, 2012, at 7:27 AM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: > So what would be the implications of hacking an extra header into > outgoing posts on lists for which personalization is enabled, say > "X-Subdata", with said header containing a hash of the subscriber > address to which the post is directed? You could do this, but the question is whether or not that header would survive through to the complaint you get via their feedback loop. I doubt that it would, but there's only one way to know for sure. > I'm not asking for a feature from the devs since I can hack this myself, > just perhaps some insight into the implications for a list host that > handles no more than half a dozen small mailing lists, each with 1000 > subscribers or less. It would be simple enough to write a milter that would work with postfix and sendmail to implement such a feature, and I strongly suspect that someone else has probably already done this. You just need to find it and install it. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] AOL redacts user addresses even with VERP and full personalization enabled
On Jun 16, 2012, at 9:58 PM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: > I have no idea why AOL wants to make it difficult for list > administrators to unsubscribe people who don't want to be subscribed and > who complain to AOL about list posts being spam. I can tell you the reasons that management gave at the time I was working there -- it was all about the privacy of their user. They said that they wanted to protect the privacy of the person who was complaining. In fact, when you sign up for the AOL Feedback Loop (as I did years ago for the lists hosted at python.org), the instructions explicitly state that you may not use any information they give you to determine who the affected user is -- they're simply telling you that you have a problem that you need to fix on your end to keep spam from being generated in the first place, and it is not relevant which AOL user is complaining. Of course, this completely ignores the problem of the AOL user who hits the "This is spam" button without knowing that they did it, or accidentally includes one of your messages when they hit that button on a whole selection of that they want to complain about. I've even seen people hit the "This is spam" button on individual personal messages that they got from a member of their own family who was of the opposite political party and who was talking about politics. Imagine your crazy Uncle Joe ranting and raving about some political party member they like/dislike and about whom you feel the opposite, and instead of asking them to stop or just deleting the message, you hit the button that tells AOL that this person spammed you. And yes, AOL knows full well just how stupid their users are. But the customer is always right. They stuck their spear into the soil, and now the shakier the ground that they stand on, the more violently they must hold onto the position that they have committed themselves to. To do otherwise would mean that they were admitting that they were wrong, which would make them culpable in court. So, you and I and everyone else on the planet has to suffer because of their stupid policies. > The only explanations > that come to mind are very sinister ones, but given the way things are > going these days, it may indeed be that AOL is truly trying to break the > Internet mail system so that they and their ilk can try to rebuild it > according to their own (for profit) model. No, they're much too short-sighted for that. And they're not smart enough for that, either. You should not assume sinister (but intelligent) motives when plain corporate stupidity will suffice. > Is there anyone with the Mailman project with sufficiently informed > inside contacts at AOL who could find out exactly what's going on with > AOL (and Earthlink, which I believe uses the same system) and why > they're doing this? All my contacts are outdated. Everyone I knew who worked there has long since moved on. But that doesn't change the reasons that were given at the time, nor the reasons why they continue to follow the same stupid policies. > It might be worth noting that one of the several lists I host will not > accept subscriptions from AOL addresses because of their problem > policies. What with gmail accounts being free and easy to get, AOL is > simply cutting themselves out of the loop in the long run with their > policies. No loss there! I'm not surprised. AOL doesn't care about those small percentages of loss for that one product. That's trivial compared to the value of the company as a whole if they were to admit that they were wrong with a result of getting their ass dragged into many more court cases. I know the guy who was the SRE for Gmail, and on the technical side they still have some people who care and have a clue. I do feel that Google is the Next Great Evil in this world, but that doesn't change the facts of the technical implementation of their mail system relative to AOL. Of course, that's not saying much…. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] more questions about Yahoo feedback loop and abuse complaints
On Jun 16, 2012, at 3:20 PM, David wrote: > Thanks, but I'm not sure how to do that. The message ID we get from AOL is > something like "snt0-p5-eas297e02bc8f051ef1aab0bfd3...@phx.gbl" and it is > related to the sender. This same ID will show up in the postfix log for > every outgoing copy of that message from that sender. > > Could you explain how you trace from the message ID to your Postfix logs? > (Maybe you use a different message ID?) When you enable Full Personalization on Mailman, it will generate a unique message for each and every recipient, with a unique message-id. If that message-id is not obscured by the Feedback Loop, then you can tell which user is at fault. For a while, they did not redact the footers that were included in the message sent back, so you could personalize the footers and that would give you an alternate place to look. I was the first Internet Mail Operations person ever hired by AOL and I was responsible for implementing the anti-spam measures that we had in place to prevent spam from getting onto the system, but regretfully the group that handles spam reports from AOL users is done by a different department. Back when David O'Donnell was running that shop, they did a really good job. But things have gone way down hill ever since. I have long since gone past the point where I consider them to be a complete write-off, despite the fact that even my own wife still uses AOL. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] scalability + ldap
On May 29, 2012, at 5:17 PM, Anil Jangity wrote: > How does mailman scale to large lists? What about 200,000 members or more? I > know a large part of this has to do with the performance of the email > infrastructure. Questions like this are pretty well addressed by the FAQ Wiki. See <http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030518>, <http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030582>, and <http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030621>. How far you want to go basically depends on how much work you're willing to put into the Mailman and MTA infrastructure in order to make it happen. > Are there plans to make use of LDAP for storing Lists information > (lists+members+lists configuration)? You'd need an LDAP member adapter -- basically, an LDAP database interface driver for Python. There was some experimental work that was done in this area for Mailman 2.1.x, but I don't think it ever got formally included in the code base. This sort of thing should be relatively easy to do with Mailman 3.x, once that ships and is stable. > Right now, we have corporate Groups in LDAP, and members in that group (e.g. > uniqueMember). When a email is sent to a Group, we have some scripts that > will do LDAP lookups and then expand to those specific email addresses and > then re-distribute emails to these individuals. > > These are internal Groups. I was debating the plusses and minuses of using a > real mailing list (mailman) for this purpose. There are people who are already doing this sort of thing with Mailman today, but it requires a bit of hacking on the code to put all the pieces together. We do not (yet) have an out-of-the-box solution in this space, at least not that I know of. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] what constitutes spam?
On May 19, 2012, at 4:13 AM, Anne Wainwright wrote: > Thanks for clarifying that, Brad, I wasn't sure what the import of > Mark's messsage was. > > Why would this not be set to 'list' rather than 'bulk'? According to RFC 2076, the "Precedence:" header is "Non-standard, controversial, discouraged." RFC 3834 says: >- A responder MAY refuse to send a response to a subject message > which contains any header or content which makes it appear to the > responder that a response would not be appropriate. For instance, > if the subject message contained a Precedence header field > [I4.RFC2076] with a value of "list" the responder might guess that > the traffic had arrived from a mailing list, and would not respond > if the response were only intended for personal messages. For > similar reasons, a responder MAY ignore any subject message with a > List-* field [I5.RFC2369]. (Because Precedence is not a standard > header field, and its use and interpretation vary widely in the > wild, no particular responder behavior in the presence of > Precedence is recommended by this specification.) and: > 3.1.8. Precedence field > >A response MAY include a Precedence field [I4.RFC2076] in order to >discourage responses from some kinds of responders which predate this >specification. The field-body of the Precedence field MAY consist of >the text "junk", "list", "bulk", or other text deemed appropriate by >the responder. Because the Precedence field is non-standard and its >interpretation varies widely, the use of Precedence is not >specifically recommended by this specification, nor does this >specification recommend any particular value for that field. Historically, the "Precedence:" header has generally only had one standard value that I know of, if it was used at all -- and that value is "bulk". The original intent of this header (and this setting) was to help automated systems that receive mail messages to determine whether or not a message was originated by a human being or was perhaps automatically generated or handled through a mailing list -- at the time, there was no such negative connotation to the word "bulk" and no one would have distinguished between "bulk" mail and mail sent through a "list". Over the years, things have changed, but the usage of this particular header has only gotten murkier. Mailman is one of the few programs on the Internet that has been fairly consistent in the way it has handled this header. Of course, Mailman is only handling one end of the conversation, and it can't control what people on the other end do with the header. If we change the way Mailman works in this regard, we might break existing programs. If we don't change the way Mailman works in this regard, people on the other end might not understand what is really intended. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] what constitutes spam?
On May 18, 2012, at 5:14 PM, Anne Wainwright wrote: > For the record the following URL is of interest > > http://www.spamhaus.org/consumer/definition/ > > This clearly makes the point that spam is defined by two factors > > "A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk" > > and being who they are their definition must carry some weight. In terms > of their definition my mailing was not spam. Still, and I think Stephen > made the point, there is also the consideration of good business > practice to be considered. Actually, if you go back to Mark's message where he said: As an additional FYI in this thread, Mailman sends invitations with a "Precedence: bulk" header. This can only be changed by modifying code. Then you will note that the message you sent does actually qualify on both counts -- it was most definitely unsolicited (by your own account), and unless you modified the source code then Mailman definitely marked those invitations as "bulk". Even if Mailman hadn't marked the messages as bulk per se, if you sent out invitations to more than one person, then that could also be classified as essentially being "bulk". There are features in Mailman that can be misused and abused in a wide variety of ways, and it is the responsibility of the Site Administrator(s) and the List Administrator(s) to make sure that they operate the software in an appropriate manner. For example, if you were using Mailman internally to your company and could guarantee that no one could ever get on any list unless they were an employee, then by the terms of the employment contract you might be able to do things that might otherwise be considered of a "spammy nature", like requiring that all employees be subscribed to certain lists that they can't unsubscribe from, sending out invitations to join mailing lists that they did not request, etc…. We have to allow for these kinds of things because not everyone uses Mailman in the same way for the same user community. And some types of actions are appropriate for certain user communities but not for others. We can't just disable or remove features simply because they are not appropriate for a particular user community. In essence, you're asking us to protect you against yourself, and there is a limit to how much of that we can do. At least, there is a limit to how much we can do if we want to keep the software usable for other people. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] what constitutes spam?
On Apr 26, 2012, at 2:39 AM, Anne Wainwright wrote: > As I said in my reply, this is hardly spam, I did not send it out to > half a million addresses purchased on a cd. This makes a mockery of > genuine spam prevention efforts when one email from a genuine address > can be allowed to cause this. It > > I don't want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but what can I do > about this. Is this a common occurence? Are invites from mailman now > considered fair game for spam detection software and humans alike? Okay, so first off, you did send the message unsolicited. That is generally considered to be one of the most basic hallmarks of spam -- the recipient got something that they never asked for. If you had a prior direct business relationship with that recipient, and they had expressed interest in being on your mailing list at some point in time in the past, then you could potentially claim that the message was not spam. Outside of that scenario, you fail test #1 -- go straight to jail, do not pass "Go", do not collect $200. That said, there are a lot of clueless Yahoo! customers, many of whom have actively asked to be on mailing lists that are hosted on python.org using Mailman, and yet they still do stupid stuff like clicking on the "THIS IS SPAM" button when the message in question was a regular message from the list that was posted as part of a discussion that they themselves were participating in -- clearly not spam. If I were actively involved in the day-to-day operations of the python.org mail system, given the amount of complaints like this that we continue to get from Yahoo! on a daily basis, I would be strongly inclined to simply ban all subscriptions from addresses at yahoo.com -- just like many mailing list administrators used to do for aol.com. Yahoo is just too poorly administered, there are way too many clueless users, and the company doesn't begin to bother to educate their users as to when they should not click the "THIS IS SPAM" button. However, the fact that Yahoo! is hopelessly clueless does not absolve you of the crime that you freely admit that you are guilty of. If you wish to persist in your spammy ways, then we can make sure that your address gets unsubscribed from this list, and that your domain gets banned from sending e-mail to python.org. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Digests and HTML-enhanced email
On Oct 21, 2011, at 11:21 PM, Lindsay Haisley wrote: > The list is configured with mime_is_default_digest set to MIME, which I > assume sends digests with each post as a separate attachment (I've never > subscribed to the digest for this list, so I don't really know). I had > assumed that this might address this problem, but apparently not. It's not done as a separate attachment, it's done as separate MIME bodyparts, which some MUAs might render as "an attachment" -- particularly, the more brain-dead ones. > One of two things needs to happen. Either the list server should refuse > and bounce posts with no MIME text/plain part, or some more intelligent > configuration of Mailman needs to be available so that posts within a > digest will render properly under these circumstances. Maybe a more > recent version of Mailman can do this, I don't know. Any suggestions > would be appreciated. Mailman can flatten HTML to plain text on ingest, and when the MIME format digest is generated, that should look mostly kinda semi-sorta correct -- at least, on the majority of less brain-dead MUAs. For MUAs that don't generate text that can be flattened, that should result in what would appear to Mailman to be an "empty" message, which should be silently dropped. Some users might wonder what is happening to their messages, if they're submitting with a really brain-dead MUA. Of course, there is still the issue of what to do with any real attachments that might have been included. Mailman can silently strip those, or it can scrub them and put them in the archives, replacing the actual attachment content with a link to the scrubbed attachment in the archives. All of this can be done on the version of Mailman that you have today, but more recent versions of Mailman might have other advantages that you might also appreciate. > I rather dislike HTML-enhanced email (to put it gently). There's no > fixed standard for it, and what renders one way in one mail reader > renders some other way in another mail reader, and it confuses the hell > out of list servers. But people will use it, increasingly it seems, and > insist on doing so, so somehow this kind of problem needs to be dealt > with. I think that the tools are already there for the bulk of list admins to deal with the bulk of problems. The only outstanding major issue that I know of that we can't fix right now is the handling of appending footers to MIME-formatted messages which can be rendered by some brain-dead MUAs as separate "attachments". So far, the consensus has been that we won't kowtow to those brain-dead MUAs, and if the users in question can't deal with these separate "attachments", then the list admins are going to have to forgo putting footers on messages as they are being passed through the system. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Incorrect timezone in mailman-generated messages
On Oct 21, 2011, at 10:04 AM, Ralf Hildebrandt wrote: >> This date header may have been put on by the local MTA on this machine, or >> it may have been put on by a Python library, but I don't think it was put on >> by Mailman itself. Note that the time is still 15:54, but the timezone is >> wrong. > > Since it's "From: mailman-boun...@solvo.ru" "To: all-ow...@solvo.ru" > isn't that a mailman generated approval mail? The message may have been generated by Mailman, but I am not 100% certain that Mailman always puts on whatever headers are required for a message, such as the Date header -- many MTAs will add headers like this for people/programs who generate messages to be sent but don't include them. Moreover, even if that header were put on before the message is handed to the MTA, I don't know that Mailman itself would be putting that header on -- I suspect that Mailman would use a Python library to do that, as opposed to doing it internally. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Incorrect timezone in mailman-generated messages
On Oct 20, 2011, at 9:09 AM, Ivan Kuznetsov wrote: > After the local timezone rules change the mailman sends messages with > incorrect timezone in Date: header. Mailman itself knows nothing about timezones. Anything to do with timezones being incorrect is almost certainly an Operating System issue, although it could be a library problem. > Received: from gate2.solvo.ru (gate2-vlan10.solvo.ru [172.16.80.4]) >by hippo.solvo.ru (Cyrus v2.2.12-Invoca-RPM-2.2.12-8.1.RHEL4) with > LMTPA; >Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:54:42 +0400 > X-Sieve: CMU Sieve 2.2 > Received: from gate2.solvo.ru (localhost.localdomain [127.0.0.1]) > by gate2.solvo.ru (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2ADCC52E802D > for ; Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:54:42 +0400 (MSK) These two headers were put on the message by the MTAs, and note that time the time is 15:54 with a timezone offset of +0400. > Subject: =?koi8-r?b?7sXEz9PUwdfMxc7Oz8UgydrXxd3FzsnFIM/CIM/bycLLxQ==?= > From: mailman-boun...@solvo.ru > To: all-ow...@solvo.ru > MIME-Version: 1.0 > Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="===0258393610==" > Message-ID: > Date: Thu, 20 Oct 2011 15:54:40 +0300 This date header may have been put on by the local MTA on this machine, or it may have been put on by a Python library, but I don't think it was put on by Mailman itself. Note that the time is still 15:54, but the timezone is wrong. > Local time in mailman logs are still correct: > > /var/log/mailman/smtp: > Oct 20 15:54:42 2011 (3173) smtp to > all for 1 recips, completed in 0.102 seconds > > /var/log/mailman/bounce: > Oct 20 15:54:40 2011 (3169) all: bounce message w/no discernable addresses: > <35292842.20111020185...@87.subnet125-163-181.speedy.telkom.net. > Oct 20 15:54:40 2011 (3169) all: forwarding unrecognized, message-id: > <35292842.20111020185...@87.subnet125-163-181.speedy.telkom.net.id> These are all references to 15:54, but there is no mention of timezone, so it's impossible to know if they are in reference to +0300 or +0400. > We are using mailman for years without such a problem before. All other > software run at this host now have the correct understanding the local time > as MSK standard time = GMT+4 > > [root@gate2 mailman]# date '+%Z %::z' > MSK +04:00:00 Okay, so the OS has been updated with an appropriate time zone definition. That's good to know. > I found the similar mailman bug #266314 > (https://bugs.launchpad.net/mailman/+bug/266314) but it was years ago and was > fixed at version 2.1.7. > > Now we run mailman 2.1.14 with Python 2.4.3 under Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 > (a clone of RHEL5) Sometimes, problems like this are as simple as a program reading the timezone definition on startup, and then never reading it again. Have you tried stopping and restarting Mailman, in order to get it (and the various Python libraries we use) to read the updated timezone definition? -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput
On 08/15/2011 02:49 AM, Brad Knowles wrote: You're talking about inbound, and how you have outsourced many of these kinds of checks to other boxes. That's fine as far as it goes, but I was talking about *outbound*, from Mailman to the world of recipients. You are likely to have a certain number of messages coming into your system which will require a certain amount of processing to scan them for viruses and spam, etc However, on outbound, you will presumably have this same number of messages multiplied by the number of recipients. I just thought of an analogy that I think will be very useful here. Input and output are two related, but very different processes -- both for computers as well as humans. Having a pee is a different process from drinking a beer -- related, but still different. Generally speaking, you want to think about mixing your inputs and your outputs -- and this gets more and more important as you scale up. A single person who pees in the Colorado River is not going to materially impact the water quality of the downstream communities, but if an entire city were to dump untreated sewage into the river on an ongoing basis, that would be a different matter. Likewise with e-mail, what works well for you as a small site is probably going to be something that you find doesn't necessarily work so well as you get bigger and bigger. Mixing your inputs and outputs is one of those factors. For example, when processing incoming e-mail, you want to apply one set of rules for handling viruses, but you want to apply a different set for outbound mail. In both cases, you want to notify the internal person at your site about the situation and let them work on how to deal with the issue, but they are the recipient on inbound and they are the sender on outbound -- so you can't take a simple "always notify the sender" or "always notify the recipient" policy. If you have performance complaints, then you have to look at where your bottlenecks are and what those bottlenecks do to you. Eliminate the biggest bottlenecks first, then work on the next one. If cost is a factor, then try to find big bottlenecks that you can fix that won't cost as much money, and keep working on eliminating those key bottlenecks as you find whatever the new issue is. Again, mixing inputs and outputs tends to be one of those key bottlenecks, both overall and with regards to return-on-investment. In the case of Mailman, we can reasonably guarantee that we follow the GIGO principle -- Garbage In, Garbage Out. If you can keep the inbound flow of e-mail clean, then there's nothing that Mailman does that should make the outbound flow dirty again, so you can safely by-pass all the checks that you would normally make at the MTA level for outbound mail from Mailman. At least, as far as your local MTA is concerned, you can eliminate all those checks. If the checks are done at your edge, then changes to your local MTA won't have any impact on whether or not that work is done and how much it costs you, but at least you can avoid causing unnecessary additional load on Mailman itself. Of course, the nature of mailing lists means that Mailman will multiply by orders of magnitude the amount of work to be done on outbound as compared to inbound, so if you can eliminate any of those unnecessary checks then that will tend to be a huge win overall with regards to both performance and monetary cost -- you won't have to devote so much money and resources to building a larger system to handle the flow, if you can make sure that the Mailman part of that flow is already clean and therefore doesn't need to be re-checked. So, the general rules are don't mix the inputs and outputs, especially as you scale up. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput
On 08/14/2011 11:24 PM, Ivan Fetch wrote: Brad, I think we are already accomplishing a lot of this minimalism, since the MTA on the Mailman VM is only accepting the message via SMTP, then handing it off to Mailman via the Postfix aliases. The spam and other checks are done before hand, by another upstream gateway MTA. That gateway then hands mailing list messages off to the Mailman box. You're talking about inbound, and how you have outsourced many of these kinds of checks to other boxes. That's fine as far as it goes, but I was talking about *outbound*, from Mailman to the world of recipients. You are likely to have a certain number of messages coming into your system which will require a certain amount of processing to scan them for viruses and spam, etc However, on outbound, you will presumably have this same number of messages multiplied by the number of recipients. If that's an average of ten recipients per list, then you have a factor of ten increase in the amount of work done to scan those messages for viruses and spam -- and since all those messages are largely identical in those regards, that's all wasted work, and therefore that's all work that you want to avoid to the greatest degree possible. As you scale up to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, etc... numbers of recipients, the more work you can avoid doing on the outbound side, the better. This is true for subscribers which are not part of our organization - the MTA which Mailman relays to accepts the messages, and then deals with any delivery issues. However, accounts for which this MTA is the final destination, will tempfail under certain conditions, like mismatched attributes in an LDAP record, or an issue with the mailstore. And those are precisely the circumstances under which the MTA should not be handing a tempfail condition back to Mailman. It should go ahead and blindly accept those messages and accept responsibility for them, and then it should deal with those tempfail cases internally. Mailman is really, really bad at handling large queues for all the same reasons that MTAs from twenty years ago were bad at handling large queues -- they're largely single threaded, disk bound, and use a single outbound directory for all file locking and message queueing, which means that they are absolutely decimated when it comes to having to scan a linear linked list on disk when trying to store the next file or pull up the next file. Modern MTAs are fully multi-threaded, they keep their active queue in memory as opposed to putting them on disk, and they hash the disk queues for inactive messages over a large distributed set of directories so if one process is working on the files in a given directory then the odds are vanishingly small that any other process would be blocked waiting on the lock for that directory. You wouldn't put a Model-T Ford into a Formula-1 race today, and likewise you should not be depending on ancient queueing methods as your bottleneck for handling all your outgoing mail. Or, if you have no choice but to depend on them at all, then you should minimize your dependence on them as much as you possibly can. For better or worse, we are moving a lot of our mailboxes to mail forwards over the next few months - this will move the rest of these tempfails out of Mailman's SMTP / retry queue, and into the downstream relay (where they belong). From Mailman's perspective, your local MTA *IS* the downstream relay, and it should not be causing these kinds of loads to be put on Mailman. Pull as much of the queueing as possible out of Mailman and put it into your local MTA. From there, it becomes an MTA problem, and it doesn't matter to Mailman whether the mailboxes are local or remote. I say all this as a specialist in designing and building large-scale mail systems (such as AOL), a long-term member of the Mailman project, and a member of the postmaster team for python.org where all the official Mailman mailing lists are hosted -- using Mailman. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput
On 08/14/2011 03:39 PM, Ivan Fetch wrote: There are some MTA tuning tips in the FAQ <http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3>, but some are only applicable to Mailman 2.0 so be careful. The majority of the MTA tuning tips that I know of should be applicable to most any mailing list manager, since they are oriented towards helping the MTA better deal with large amounts of outgoing mail, and optimizing certain types of behaviors that are common with most mailing lists. But I'll have to re-fresh my memory of what is written there. The main outgoing MTA performance killer is doing DNS verification on recipient domains during SMTP from Mailman. This should be avoided. Using a local DNS cache cut my 5000 messages to a 25 recipient list, from 10 minutes down to 8& 1/2 minutes. Even avoiding looking up the same hand full of hosts over and over again, helps. Generally speaking, if there are any real-time queries being done by your MTA, you want those done against the message as it comes into your mail system the first time -- this includes checking black lists, checking content, or anything else. You want to run a separate instance of your MTA for handling your outbound mail and it should listen only to a special port on the 127.0.0.1 "loopback" interface where Mailman can speak directly to it, and that special instance should have pretty much all DNS queries and real-time checks turned off. After all, those things should have been done when the message was checked on inbound and shouldn't need to be checked again on outbound. I have to amend my earlier statement about our receiving 68000 posts per day - I was not careful enough when mining the post log; a lot of the posts are Mailman retrying delivery for tempfailed subscribers. So we do not see 68000 distinct posts, but we are doing a lot of redelivery attempts. Apparently we need to tune bounce processing for lists - this can be challenging to get right, and seems to require individual attention per list. I suppose I could have Mailman retry delivery less often, and if we have something like an outage of our own relays, I just trigger a retry by restarting the queue runners. If Mailman is dealing with tempfails, then you've done something wrong. The MTA should be blindly accepting whatever Mailman has to send, and then the MTA should be dealing with tempfails -- it's one step closer to wherever the problem might be, and it's more likely to be tuned for that kind of behaviour. For example, most modern MTAs give you the ability to set up separate queues for given outbound targets, which are kept apart from all the other regular mail being handled. This way you can set up "local" queues in your MTA that may have different resource handling rules or different retry algorithms, as compared to queues to external sites that might be known for being troublesome. We were doing this kind of thing at AOL back in the mid-90s, and this has only gotten easier since. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Upgrading and converting mailman to postfix
On Apr 20, 2011, at 9:59 PM, Steven Jones wrote: > a) Docs or how easy is it to straight migrate from RHEL3 (2.1.5) to RHEL6 > (2.1.12) ? What does Red Hat tell you about migrating from sendmail to postfix with RHEL3 -> RHEL6? In my experience, postfix goes pretty far out of its way to be as much of a drop-in replacement for sendmail as can reasonably be done. But that's in a more typical Unix type of environment where you're building tools from source, or using a BSD-style "ports" system. I can't speak for how that would work in a more regimented binary-only RPM package environment. > b) How easy is it to convert a sendmail setup with /etc/aliases to postfix? > any automated scripts? My experience has been that postfix is the most natural MTA to pair with Mailman, and I've been involved in the postfix community since the very earliest days back when Wietse was still calling it VMailer. We've been using postfix with Mailman on python.org at least as long as I've been involved in the Mailman project -- and we're talking multiple years in both cases. By default, postfix includes some standard tools for taking the same sorts of source files and turning them into a postfix-native binary format (by replacing the "newaliases" command, among other things). However, I don't know how Red Hat chooses to modify that situation when they build a postfix package for their platform. You'd have to ask them where their tools are and how those tools change from one version of RHEL to another. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Question about Mailman domain and OS X serverset-up.
Sorry, my wife's computer has been down for days, and in the meanwhile she as taken over mine. At this point, all I've got is an iPad and a semi-wonky server in the closet, and neither of them is well suited for keeping up with lots of email. I'll fix that when I get her computer repaired and back into her hands so that I can get my computer back, but until then I'm going to be even more of an absentee admin for this list than normal. I may actually be getting a job soon doing Enterprise Mac OS X consulting, and if I do then I will let you folks know. If that happens, then I could potentially be available to do remote consulting for this kind of stuff through my employer. -- Brad Knowles Sent from my iPad On Apr 3, 2011, at 1:42 AM, JRC Groups wrote: > Thanks Brad and Mark for your helpful and detailed replies. > > I have reached a point where I have the lists almost working but there are > some issues still preventing the systems from functioning in a way that > allows me to confident to launch these lists I wish to create. > > Apple's support has been MIA at best so I have given up and decided to seek > other alternatives. Also, the numerous individuals I have spoken with at > Apple were clearly (1) not interested in making any improvements or fixing > the current issues with the version of Mailman that ships with OS X Server > and (2) didn't know any more about it than I do (which is quite embarrassing > considering they are part of the company's business support department). > > I can't imagine that there is anything other than some minor set-up issues > that need to be corrected with my system. After all, I am sending and > receiving e-mails and the lists are functional (to an extent anyway) as they > send and receive messages. However, as I stated above, I don't want to > launch the lists only to attract subscribers and then find out in a short > while that Mailman has stopped working because something with my system > wasn't set-up properly. > > I also can't imagine that it would be too difficult to install a new version > of Mailman and manage it using its browser-based interface while ignoring > Apple's System Administrator tool for this specific task. > > Brad, since you have this much experience with OS X Server would you be > interested in helping me with my problem ? In case you are, please contact > me off-list so that we can discuss it. I believe you should be able to > connect remotely, right ? In case you are not interested, would you > recommend me someone who is knowledgeable on both OS X Server and Mailman ? > I have contacted numerous Apple consultants but couldn't find a single one > who had any experience with Mailman. > > Thanks again for your helpful replies. > > Best regards, > > Joe > > --- > > On 3/30/11 5:36 PM, "Brad Knowles" wrote: > >> On Mar 30, 2011, at 6:15 PM, JRC Groups wrote: >> >>> Is there anyone on the list who is familiar with both OS X Server and >>> Mailman to help with this problem ? I am willing to pay a consultation fee >>> to someone who can connect to my server remotely and help solve this issue. >> >> I've been an Apple consultant, at least part-time. I came within a hairs >> breadth of doing that job full-time for a local Apple VAR. I've got all the >> PDF versions of all the official Apple documentation on Mac OS X and Mac OS X >> Server, as well as PDF versions of the good 3rd party books on the subject. >> And I've been a professional Unix system administrator and consultant for >> over >> twenty years. >> >> The guy who used to run lists.apple.com was involved in the development and >> support of Mailman long before I came along, and has more experience in the >> business than I do. >> >> I don't mean to sound pessimistic or to rain on your parade, but in both >> cases, the solution was to blow away the stuff that Apple ships, and to >> install the "real deal" code as downloaded from list.org. >> >> >> The Mailman project is freely available open source (under a GNU license, no >> less), and the support we provide is best effort. There is no commercial >> version of Mailman that we sell or officially support. Anyone else that >> includes Mailman as part of a commercial product or service that they sell, >> should include with that a full after-sales support staff. >> >> >> Note that there isn't going to be a separate "Server" edition of Mac OS X >> "Lion". >> >> No one seems to know if this means that all the stuff that the "Ser
Re: [Mailman-Users] Question about Mailman domain and OS X serverset-up.
On Mar 30, 2011, at 6:15 PM, JRC Groups wrote: > Is there anyone on the list who is familiar with both OS X Server and > Mailman to help with this problem ? I am willing to pay a consultation fee > to someone who can connect to my server remotely and help solve this issue. I've been an Apple consultant, at least part-time. I came within a hairs breadth of doing that job full-time for a local Apple VAR. I've got all the PDF versions of all the official Apple documentation on Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server, as well as PDF versions of the good 3rd party books on the subject. And I've been a professional Unix system administrator and consultant for over twenty years. The guy who used to run lists.apple.com was involved in the development and support of Mailman long before I came along, and has more experience in the business than I do. I don't mean to sound pessimistic or to rain on your parade, but in both cases, the solution was to blow away the stuff that Apple ships, and to install the "real deal" code as downloaded from list.org. The Mailman project is freely available open source (under a GNU license, no less), and the support we provide is best effort. There is no commercial version of Mailman that we sell or officially support. Anyone else that includes Mailman as part of a commercial product or service that they sell, should include with that a full after-sales support staff. Note that there isn't going to be a separate "Server" edition of Mac OS X "Lion". No one seems to know if this means that all the stuff that the "Server" edition used to include will now be available to everyone, and that all the people who developed the "Server" edition of Mac OS X have been transitioned over to the mainline code development team, or if that means that a lot of products and services will get thrown out the door as Apple re-focuses exclusively on the retail/home user market. But that is certainly something that you should keep in mind as you look towards solutions in this space. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Question about Mailman domain and OS X server set-up.
On Mar 28, 2011, at 1:31 AM, JRC Groups wrote: > While discussing some possible DNS set-up issues I might need to resolve on > my server a certain IT professional mentioned to me that Mailman shouldn't > be run using a virtual domain. I am not sure if this professional was > referring to virtual domains in general or only those running on Mac OS X > Server. In general, there are absolutely no problems running Mailman on a machine that hosts multiple virtual domains. The machines at python.org do this today. While the official purpose of the machines is to serve the python.org domain and the mailing lists for this domain, there are lists for multiple other virtual domains that are also hosted there, and a single Mailman instance manages all those mailing lists just fine. There are some issues you need to be aware of with regards to using a single Mailman instance to handle mailing lists for multiple virtual domains, which are detailed in the FAQ wiki. But so long as you make sure that you don't ever try to create a mailing list by the same name in multiple different virtual domains that are handled by the same Mailman instance, there shouldn't be any major problems. However, the version of Mailman as shipped by Apple has some significant differences from the official version of Mailman as we provide for download from the list.org site (and mirrors). These issues are also covered in the FAQ Wiki, but the gist is that we cannot definitively provide answers for how the Apple-provided version of Mailman will work. Since they modified the code that is installed, if you want support for the Apple-provided version of Mailman, you would need to go to Apple for that. We can give you our best guess for how we think things should work in those kinds of situations, but that's about the best we can do. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Subscriber Counts - daily report
On Jan 6, 2011, at 2:11 PM, Drew Tenenholz wrote: > In our majordomo (yikes!) system, someone created some PERL and a cron to > send a daily message to the list admins (and other interested parties) about > the number of subscribers to individual lists and a de-duped total number of > subscribers with columns for yesterday's total, today's total, difference, > %change, and list name. Is anyone doing something similar in Mailman/Python? > Are you willing to share your code? There is a script I created called "mmdsr" which lives in the /contrib section of the more recent releases of Mailman. Mark Sapiro has taken over maintenance of that script, so please feel free to feed any changes back to him and he can get them into the next release. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Interesting problem with gmail users
On Dec 7, 2010, at 1:40 PM, Paul Tomblin wrote: > However, those two users are still showing that banner "Due to a > filter you created, this message was not sent to Spam. Edit Filters". > I guess it's just a Google thing now, not a Mailman problem. But if > anybody on the list has any insight into that banner and how to get > rid of it, I'd like to hear it. Google knows better than you do what kinds of headers they're supposed to see on messages that claims to be coming from senders on Gmail. If you don't have those headers on your e-mail (maybe your mailing list management software removed them), then that would be likely to cause problems. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] BATV and Mailman
On Sep 22, 2010, at 12:02 PM, Christopher Adams wrote: > I have had a couple of list subscribers fail to post message to their > lists. I tracked down the logs and this seems to be the common theme. > I Googled prvs= and found info on BATV. Does Mailman not play well > with this or am I not quite understanding what this means? For those who are not familiar with this term, they should see the Wikipedia page at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bounce_Address_Tag_Validation>. Suffice it to say that BATV has more than a few problems. I proposed an alternative that I called Bounce Address Fingerprint Validation which would achieve the same goals but doesn't actually do munging of the Envelope Sender address, but that ran into more than a little resistance from the supporters of BATV. And when combined with things like VERP, it can really screw things up. > : Sender address rejected: > undeliverable address: host senders.mailserver.com[xxx.xx.xxx.xx] > said: 550 5.1.1 I think some critical information is being lost here. We need to see the entire error message being generated, and we need to know more information about how this system relates to the Mailman installation, etc -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Sep 3, 2010, at 2:01 AM, W. Curtis Preston wrote: > So it seems I misunderstood your previous post. Sorry about that. I followed > your suggestion. Both of them, actually. I tried all of the following URLs, > to no avail. The first two do at least display just the username in > question. I did change the chunksize variable and did the latter two URLs, > and that didn't work either. (In case it's not obvious, I tried using the > values off/on and 0/1 in case that was the problem.) I'm sure Mark will correct me if I'm wrong, but I assume you stopped and restarted Mailman after making the chunksize change? I don't think that this is something that is baked into the list when it's created, but is instead something that can be changed after-the-fact, and all that should be required is a restart. But there's something tickling in the back of my brain regarding this, and I can't figure out what it is -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 29, 2010, at 7:50 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > I don't like cPanel's way of operating, and I agree that Apple's > interaction with the open source community *outside of Darwin* takes a > lot more out than it puts back in. Still, the GPL doesn't give any > cause for action AFAICS. If there are no courses of action open to us in the courts in these matters, then in such cases I might be inclined to think that a suitably crafted and executed PR campaign would be an alternative to be considered. But setting aside all of the things in this thread that have been said so far, I would like to point out that I have not made any irrevocable decisions on the matter, and I have yet to take any actual action. I've spoken about what my tendencies and inclinations would be, nothing more. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 29, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Todd Zullinger wrote: > I'm not arguing that if a distributor patches Mailman and changes core > behavior to the point that it causes confusion for users and > potentially sullies Mailman's reputation that it's fine and should be > left alone. Just trying to see what grounds on which you want the > lawyers to complain. Oh, and for me, it has nothing to do with sullying our reputation. It has much more to do with crippling our ability to support our customers, because experience has taught us that many of these vendors want to ship code without providing any of the actual support costs. If they're going to externalize onto us (a non-profit, unpaid, volunteer organization) all of their customer support costs for this part of their commercial package that they may sell for large sums of money, then as I see it they owe us one of two things: 1. Payment of money and other significant physical resources to provide the customer support that they are unable or unwilling to provide themselves 2. At least contribute all their code changes back to us so that our additional cost is minimized to support all their customers that they are unable or unwilling to support themselves Otherwise, in my mind, they are quite literally stealing from the community, and they should suffer the criminal and civil court consequences. This is not to say that all vendors necessarily want to externalize all their support costs onto us, but that there are significant numbers of vendors who want to ship sewage out the door and put a hefty price tag on it, and they do everything they possibly can to make sure that none of their customers can come back to them and actually receive adequate support for the effluent that was delivered. In those cases, the collateral damage to the community is a very real cost that we all have to bear our part of, just so that the company can make good on their get-rich-quick scheme, which they perpetrate at the expense of everyone else. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 29, 2010, at 9:59 AM, Todd Zullinger wrote: > I'm not arguing that if a distributor patches Mailman and changes core > behavior to the point that it causes confusion for users and > potentially sullies Mailman's reputation that it's fine and should be > left alone. Just trying to see what grounds on which you want the > lawyers to complain. If a vendor is changing where files are stored and nothing else, then I don't think there's anything to complain about -- all code may need a certain amount of customization to fit into a different filesystem structure. I think that we can account for those kinds of changes with nothing more than different sets of parameters that go into the configuration file. If they can share those kinds of changes with us, we may be able to incorporate them into an upcoming version of the code we release, so that next time one of their customers may be able to upgrade with a command that is basically just "./configure; ./install; /path/to/mailmanctl restart". That would be a win-win-win scenario -- a win for the customer, a win for the vendor, and a win for us. However, if a vendor is changing underlying application functionality, that would be something I would be much more concerned about. If it's just keeping the code from daemonizing when they do a "mailmanctl start", I think that's something we could accommodate with a future version of our code -- and then we can get back to that win-win-win scenario mentioned above. If there's more to it than that, then I would definitely be inclined to be much tougher in my response. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Commercial distributions of Mailman & GPL
On Aug 28, 2010, at 12:02 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >> I'm tempted to use the FSF lawyers instead of seeing if we can go >> through PSF, since the FSF lawyers have recently had some fairly >> public successes, and they might be more inclined to help try to >> find all the ways in which we can go after them. > > AFAIK much of Mailman is owned by the FSF, and maybe none by the PSF. > So only the FSF would have standing anyway. It's currently licensed under the GPL, but as a project written in Python, I wonder if we might also be able to make the case that the PSF lawyers could be brought in. Even if we could, I would be inclined to go with the FSF lawyers first. > Technically for GPLv2, a commercial distributor should be distributing > source on the same media that they distribute the installer, so this > might not be enough to be in compliance. But the code is publicly > available, and realistically, this is as much as we want to ask for. It's Python, so unless they're doing a pre-compiled bytecode distribution, they are distributing the source on the same media as the installer -- the source is all they've got. It's not executable code until Python gets its hands on it and turns it into bytecode, and then keeps a cached copy of that bytecode around so that it doesn't need to go through this process again, unless the source is changed. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 28, 2010, at 10:05 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > Just FYI, 2.1.14 is going to be released next month. You might want to > wait. I've been totally out of the loop for way too long. I need to get back up to speed and see what is changing and how that might affect our operations for python.org. Thanks for the heads-up! -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 28, 2010, at 10:15 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > I would love to have a better relationship with the cPanel Mailman > folks, but I have none. They don't acknowledge me at all. Anything I > know about cPanel Mailman internals is via code provided to me by 3rd > parties. I recently bought a MacOS X Server box with Snow Leopard pre-installed. At least we will now have first-hand access to the changes that Apple has made, and we can see what it would take to have better integration there -- if we want it. >> Please don't threaten to sue them! I want Mailman 3.0 and the only way I,m >> going to get to use it is through cPanel. > > All we would ask is that they continue their past practice of > identifying their modified Mailman as, e.g. 2.1.13-cp1 so that we know > what we're dealing with. I was thinking more of a Cease & Desist nastygram from the lawyers, myself. If they're not shipping plain-jane real-deal 2.1.13 but are misidentifying what they are shipping as this version, then I'm pretty sure that would be construed to be a misrepresentation on their part, and would be actionable in court. I'm tempted to use the FSF lawyers instead of seeing if we can go through PSF, since the FSF lawyers have recently had some fairly public successes, and they might be more inclined to help try to find all the ways in which we can go after them. After that, we might think about whether or not we can, or should, go after Apple. Both companies are shipping our code with extensive modifications, and so far as I know neither of them has released their changes, as required by the GNU license. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 28, 2010, at 12:35 AM, W. Curtis Preston wrote: > What I know is that the bottom of the screen where it displays the version > number says 2.1.13 and nothing more. > > Any thoughts on my URL problem? Any chance you have a "real" 2.1.13 install > out there we can test it on? I'm sure that Mark and Barry have "real" 2.1.13 systems out there that this could be tested with, but I do not currently have access to such myself, at least not in any kind of publicly accessible place. I am sorely tempted to log onto mail.python.org and do the upgrade right then and there, and make sure that we eat our own dogfood. However, I really should coordinate this with the guys who've been doing the day-to-day administration of mail.python.org for the past several months. Let me see how quickly we can get that upgrade done. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cannot set digest mode via URL
On Aug 27, 2010, at 11:46 AM, W. Curtis Preston wrote: > Sorry, typo. It's 2.1.13. Are you sure it's 2.1.13, and not something like 2.1.11-cp3? In all the versions I've ever seen cPanel release, they've always included a dash and then their internal version identifier for their modified code. If they are now shipping something and calling it 2.1.13 and it's not exactly the same code that we provide from <http://www.list.org/download.html>, then I think it's time we had the PSF and/or FSF lawyers give them a call -- and speaking as a member of the Mailman Cabal, I will make sure to carry through on that, if necessary. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Delivery to SMTP server very slow
On Feb 20, 2010, at 4:15 PM, Stefan Foerster wrote: > What is a "smaller sub-list"? The list in question does only hold 11k > recipients, which is not exactly large. Some off my SVN announce lists > are much larger. Yeah, but an announce-only list that is larger doesn't really compare to a discussion list which is smaller. The smaller discussion list is likely to be much more active, and if you multiply the number of unique messages posted to the list by the number of subscribers, you may find that the smaller discussion list actually results in considerably more traffic than the larger announce-only list. Now, I'm not saying that this is definitely the case. And for just 11k users, it does seem unlikely. But this is a possibility that would be useful to eliminate. In your case, I think I'd probably first try the multiple queue-runners thing by doing powers-of-2 splits. Regretfully, this is not well documented, but I think there is one or two FAQ Wiki questions that discuss it. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Delivery to SMTP server very slow
On Feb 20, 2010, at 3:27 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > As I said, I think it would just be the config.pck. Everything else is > open source software, but I don't think I want it. It's not that I'm not > curious because I definitely am, but I don't want to accidentally send > mail to any of the list members. Another test would be to break up the large list into a number of smaller sub-lists with an umbrella list. That would allow Mailman to have a lot more internal parallelism, and not get into lock synchronization issues over config.pck. You could also run multiple sets of qrunners, if you split things correctly according to the "powers of 2" rule. > I suppose I could just create a pseudo > MTA to listen on the SMTPPORT you use and just respond with 250 to every > message. > > Actually, you could try that too and see what it does with your list. > I'll make a little Python script for that. Much simpler solution here is to use the "smtpsink" program that Wietse supplies as part of the test harness for postfix. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam filtering
On Feb 17, 2010, at 8:35 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: >> SPF and DKIM solve 2 different parts of the problem of forged emails. >> Neither provides complete coverage, together they work well. > > Please explain. AFAICR, neither works very well with mailing lists > because they're both designed on the assumption that the endpoints are > directly connected (in the sense that intermediaries like Mailman must > be pure relays and not add anything to header or payload). SPF works at the envelope level, but without modification it breaks things like forwarding, is vulnerable to DNS cache pollution/poisoning attacks, etc DKIM works at the content level and cryptographically signs the headers, but is vulnerable to MTAs and mail gateways that may transform the content or the representation of the content in ways that would normally appear to be transparent, but in fact wind up breaking the cryptographic signature. Both have their uses, and both have their own set of limitations. There are proposals on the table to try to help fix various known issues with these two tools, as well as to help fill in some of the other gaps. We'll see if these proposals get anywhere. > You can say that Mailman lists with value-added should re-sign, but > that doesn't play very well because mailing lists are somewhat like > common carriers. Making the Mailman list responsible for spam etc > (which is what re-signing does) is going to kill a lot of discussion > lists. IMO, Mailman should not re-sign. If there was anything that would sign the outgoing messages, that would be the MTA and not Mailman. Or, if Mailman is going to re-sign, then it should rename all but the minimum set of headers and then sign only the minimal set, in effect saying "I scanned the message on inbound and it didn't look like spam to me, and the users requested that these messages be sent on to them, so here's the minimal stuff I trust about this message". At that point, if some downstream site marks the message as spam and this hurts the reputation of the site running Mailman, then the site running Mailman should ban the downstream site that inappropriately blamed it for sending the content that their recipient(s) asked to receive. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Increasing the Speed of Email Delivery
On Dec 23, 2009, at 1:12 PM, Derrick Wooden wrote: > I'm well aware that SMTP doesn't mean instant. Regretfully, you are the exception. Most people don't seem to get this concept -- even people like my wife, and I've been trying to pound this one into her brain for ten years. > I'm just looking at a solution that can cut 1E6 emails being delivered in 12 > hours down to say 4 hours. With a fast server, correct MTA optimization and > proper Mailman setup could this be attainable? I believe so, yes. However, optimization would have to be done at all levels, not just the MTA. If you've got that many recipients, then you're probably seeing a lot of Python pickle contention during initial list delivery, and you'd want to break that down into a number of sub-lists. If you have a million recipients, then a thousand sublists with a thousand subscribers each would probably be overkill, but a hundred sublists with ten thousand subscribers each probably would not be enough. Using postfix, you can tune things for maximum parallelization, and eliminate things like unnecessary DNS queries and blacklist checks on outbound (because you've already done them on inbound, or it's an announce-only list and they don't need to be done at all). You can also tune things so that any messages which don't get delivered right away can get pushed off onto another "slow delivery" server, thus keeping the primary server pumping as fast as possible. For an announce-only list, you might also want to consider putting the primary mail queues on solid-state disk -- you shouldn't need a particularly large SSD for the primary server if the "slow delivery" server has sufficient storage. Your primary bottlenecks are going to be disk latency and locking contention. If you can eliminate or minimize those, everything else should flow as fast as your Internet connection allows. > The Barack Obama email campaign used Postfix for their MTA and PHP Mailer to > deliver their newsletters. How many people did they deliver to? How many machines did they have doing delivery? How often did they send out messages? How large were those messages? Did they do DKIM signing on each message? There's lots of variables here that could affect their numbers relative to what you might be able to achieve. > I'm using a package install of Mailman along with Exim through cPanel. I > now know that this setup is not optimal and needs lots of tweaking. I'm > looking into VERP also based on helpful information in the FAQs. I've done the best I can to encode as much of my knowledge as possible into the FAQs. Pretty much everything is there, or I point to references where the rest of the information can be found. The key is knowing what you're looking for and when you've found it. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Increasing the Speed of Email Delivery
On Dec 23, 2009, at 11:24 AM, Derrick Wooden wrote: > Brad, upon reading this thread again you are correct. It was NOT implied > that MySQL would speed up email delivery, but rather MySQL would be a better > database solution. As a database, yes -- MySQL is better at that job than using Python "pickles", which is what Mailman does today. Unfortunately, there are no official interfaces between the current version of Mailman and MySQL. There is the MySQL Member Adapter, but it's not officially supported (so far as I know), so the best you can get with the current version is to run a script which periodically extracts the information from MySQL and then puts that into Mailman, and vice-versa. Mailman3 will have a much improved database interface that will include MySQL, but it's not here yet. > Brad, I would be interested in contracting your services. Please email me > off the forum. derrickwooden AT gmail Unfortunately, I am not in a position to do this kind of consulting anymore. I'll give advice for free, but that's the best I can do at the moment. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman < > forum ?
On Dec 21, 2009, at 1:49 AM, John Fitzsimons wrote: > Are there currently *any* web forum(s) that enable forum/mailman > mirroring ? In other words a Mailman email going to a web forum and > vica versa ? Search the FAQ wizard for "web forum". You should find a link to an article that talks about Joomla. That's the best integration I know of, although I'm sure there are others. > I believe that something like this could work with phpbb2 but not the > current release. Can anyone help please ? I'm not personally aware of anything, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Increasing the Speed of Email Delivery
On Dec 18, 2009, at 12:15 AM, Derrick Wooden wrote: > I have been doing a lot of reading along that wise. As a result I'm setting > up the new server with no cPanel and will use Postfix as my MTA. I will do > a clean install of Mailman 2.13 so that I can be on the same page as most > users. It's not just the MTA. It's also the configuration. I could build a Sendmail configuration that could beat the pants off an out-of-the-box postfix configuration, if the list was large enough and I had enough hardware to do the job right. I'm sure that we could find people who could do the same with Exim. IMO, using postfix will give you a good initial default configuration and it won't take as much tweaking to improve the mail delivery performance, but that's just a personal opinion. > I read in a 2004 (or earlier thread) where using MySQL db tables would also > increase the speed. I will also utilize this option. I don't know of any way that MySQL would factor into this discussion. Can you provide a reference? -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Meta: bringing along the newcomers
On Dec 18, 2009, at 7:09 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > It's under 100 lines, of which almost half were cut-and-pasted from > the existing FAQ 1.22. Most of which I wrote, and which I probably was not in a particularly good mood when I wrote it. It definitely needs re-working. > Anyway, you're entirely missing the point. I don't expect anybody to > read FAQ 1.22 in advance of comitting a faux pas; this particular FAQ > is mostly for pointing to *afterward*. Indeed. That is precisely the point. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Feature request: Emergency Broadcast
On Nov 22, 2009, at 6:14 PM, Gadi Evron wrote: > Brad Knowles wrote: >> At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually >> give you the support you require. > > Brad, crappy providers aside, do you think this might be a useful feature? I can see that it might be a useful feature, yes. However, the laundry list of "useful features" that could be added to Mailman is several miles long and almost as wide, and I'm not qualified to judge where on that laundry list this particular feature would/should fall -- I'll leave that to the Mailman developers, like Barry and Mark. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Feature request: Emergency Broadcast
On Nov 22, 2009, at 9:36 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > This could be done with bin/inject on the Mailman server to inject a > message directly into Mailman's in/ queue bypassing the MTA, but you > don't have the required access. Since you don't have the required > access, I do see the need in your case, but this won't happen before > MM3 if then. We can repeat the mantra -- Mailman was *NEVER* designed to be used in a Service Provider environment, especially not with multiple customers who may have very different needs, and most especially not when the Service Provider in question doesn't actually provide any of the necessary support to go along with the software. If I could shoot every single service provider who just threw up whatever kind of crap they thought they could make stick and make a point of avoiding all the necessary support, there would be many, many fewer crappy providers in this world. At the very least, you should find a different provider where they actually give you the support you require. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] How to monitor mailman transaction
On Nov 16, 2009, at 12:10 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Hien HUYNH HUU writes: > >> Wow , may be this is my problem . Could you explain me more ? > > I'm sorry, I don't really have time to go back and look at all the > information right now. The issues are pretty well explained in > several FAQs (unfortunately there are a few relevant ones, but I think > you get all of them if you search for "performance"). If you enable any kind of personalization, then you'll get individual messages being delivered by Mailman to the MTA. This includes footers with a user-specific string to tell them what their particular link is to unsubscribe from the list, etc You'll have to disable all types of personalization and VERP to get more than one recipient per message being sent to the MTA. And qmail is not an ideal MTA for maximum performance on a mailing list -- I can run rings around it with postfix. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] How to monitor mailman transaction
On Nov 11, 2009, at 11:36 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > I think that in the contrib directory there's a script that produces a > summary of the logs. You should be able to get such statistics with > that script or a modified version. I originally wrote the mmdsr script because there was all sorts of information in the wide variety of Mailman logs, but it was very inconsistent in the way that information was logged, and what went into what log file. At the time, I desperately needed more information to help me assist in the management of the mailing lists and general mail server functions for python.org, including this list. Since then, I've gotten a better handle on what is going on when, and I have had less need for the script myself, but there are others on the Mailman/Python.org Postmaster Team who continue to find that information very useful. Mark has semi-unofficially taken over continuing maintenance on it, which is fine by me because I haven't had the time or inclination to deal with some of the issues that have been reported since the last time I touched the script. However, that's just the Mailman side of that equation. You should have similar tools for whatever MTA you're using, so that you get a better idea of what's going on across the whole system. I have not touched any such scripts in many, many years, but I'm sure there are plenty of such tools available for various popular MTAs out there. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Using Mailman with Multi Mail Server
On Oct 29, 2009, at 11:54 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote: > If I understand the OP's situation, this probably won't help. I think it > is a case of a single post to a large list. In this case, a single > OutgoingRunner will handle the message and the other runners will do > nothing. If it's a case of a single post to a large list, then the problem is most likely going to be Python pickle contention. Split the large list up into multiple smaller sub-lists, with a parent "umbrella" list. More info on that solution is in the FAQ wiki, but the OP should have already found that if they searched for "performance". I can guarantee you that I can build an MTA configuration that is faster than Mailman could ever possibly be, for this single reason alone -- even if you run both on a pure RAMdisk. As for the rest, an option would be to use a load-balancing switch (either hardware or implemented in software), but there's a heck of a lot of tuning to be done on a single machine running a properly configured MTA and a properly designed mailing list server infrastructure, before you get to the point where load balancing switches and multiple outbound mail relay servers would start to make a big difference. Most of these topics are at least touched on in the FAQ Wiki and the fact that the OP hasn't mentioned them tells me that they either didn't do their homework, or they don't understand the concepts well enough to be able to do the homework. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
Re: [Mailman-Users] Donate to the GNU Mailman Project (directed donation program)
Verwaltung wrote: we want to sponsor 500 $ for the further development of your excellent GNU Mailman Project. Is it possible that we will appear as a sponsor (directed donation program) on the URL http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/index.html below "Thanks go out to:" with a link to our agency http://www.seocomplete.de and anchor text "Suchmaschinenoptimierung"? Actually, I think the best thing for you to do is to go to the page at <https://my.fsf.org/donate/directed-donations/gnumailman> and fill out the form there. If you have any more questions about this process, please send an e-mail message to mailman-ca...@python.org. -- Brad Knowles Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Multiple instances of Mailman on FreeBSD
Jeffrey Goldberg wrote: I'm posting this to both the mailman-users list and the freebsd-ports list. I realize that not all follow-up will make it to both lists. I would like to set up multiple instances of Mailman on a FreeBSD 7-STABLE system with using Postfix. Looking at the ports Makefile, it appears that if I set MM_DIR=mailman/vhosts/domain-for-this-instance everything should work file (plus add FORCE_PACKAGE_REGISTER allow this second instance to be installed.) Personally, I wouldn't use the ports version if you want to do multiple instances of Mailman. I would install each version from our official source tarballs that you can download from www.list.org and ftp.gnu.org. Alternatively, if you want to use the ports version, then I would keep it simple and serve only one domain. Otherwise, I would recommend that you find the port maintainer for Mailman, and discuss this subject with them. Hopefully, they would know enough about both sides of the problem to be able to recommend a solution or patch for you. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Load testing a mailman server
on 8/7/09 12:48 AM, Rakotomandimby Mihamina said: I'm wondering if anyone can provide any ideas, insights or warnings with respect to this sort of thing? I think you should firts enquire the debian and python mailing list managers. They could give you some statistics (CPU usage, Network used, what hardware,...) We've got some information in FAQ 1.15 at <http://wiki.list.org/x/NoA9> with regards to the largest lists that can be run with Mailman, but that doesn't directly address the issue of tools to do actual load testing. Myself, I tend to use the "smtpsource" and "smtpsink" tools that Wietse Venema created (available as part of the standard postfix source installation, although perhaps not included with binary package versions from other sources), along with the "postal" tools written by Russ Coker (see <http://doc.coker.com.au/projects/postal/>). If you're going to be doing any benchmarking or load-testing, make sure you read, understand, and follow all the various relevant FAQs in the Mailman FAQ Wiki, especially in section 6. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Approved: password header!
on 8/6/09 9:14 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull said: > I'll consider this as a feature for Mailman 2.2 I think this is unwise. The subject header is read by everybody, and you can't just delete it, so you have to munge it. More complexity. It's not so hard to add an Approved pseudo-header. Some people really, really don't know what their software can do, and can't be taught how to make use of advanced features. Others may be able to learn how to use advanced features, but they are forced to use software that is locked down into a configuration that they can't change. So, the question becomes this -- at what point do you stop bending over backwards to try to make seriously broken MUAs (or seriously un-savvy MUA users) be able to have some sort of minimal functionality, and at what point do you decide that it's too much work or opens too large of a security hole? That's not a question I can answer. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Strange Wiki entry for Postfix Tuning
on 8/4/09 5:11 AM, Stefan Förster said: So, what is the reason for that setting? From man 5 postconf: ,[ man 5 postconf | less +/^smtp_mx_session_limit ] | smtp_mx_session_limit (default: 2) | | The maximal number of SMTP sessions per delivery request before | giving up or delivering to a fall-back relay host, or zero (no | limit). This restriction ignores sessions that fail to complete | the SMTP initial handshake (Postfix version 2.2 and earlier) or | that fail to complete the EHLO and TLS handshake (Postfix version | 2.3 and later). | | This feature is available in Postfix 2.1 and later. ` While I can certainly imagine larger sites having somewhere between five to ten MXs, 100 seems a bit... oversized. The way I read this, it has nothing to do with the number of MXes you have. It has to do with how many SMTP delivery sessions you'll attempt over the same connection before you drop the connection and re-connect (if you have more than this number of deliveries left), and that re-connection may well end up going to a different MX. This helps avoid conditions where you get locked into a particular MX that is slow, and that slows down all your delivery to that site, for as long as you have mail for that site. But I would expect Ralf to know the answer to this question better than I do -- after all, it has been a number of years since I wrote that, and at my age, the memory starts to go. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Reply to
on 7/23/09 11:10 AM, Wayne said: I don't understand the whole reply to stuff. I don't want to allow users to hit reply and it to reply to the group. I have it set to strip the header and the reply to is set to poster. For the most part, if you leave the header alone, then you will get the behaviour you want. The only time this won't happen is when the sender of the message provides a different Reply-to: header on their own message. You could strip those and set reply-to-poster, but that shouldn't be necessary in 99.9% of the cases. The only reason the header exists is for those cases where someone running a list *does* want to force everyone to always reply to the whole list and not privately reply back to someone. If you don't try to force that behaviour, then you can mostly just not worry about this header. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Batch send?
on 7/22/09 1:57 PM, Webmaster said: Maybe I'm missing this but my server only lets me send 200 per hour. I need to send a message once per week to a club of 600. I can't find a batch processing timer, is there one? The short answer is "no". The long answer would be to go to the FAQ Wiki at <http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions> and search for "rate limit". -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] multiple lists ..
on 7/17/09 11:55 AM, Mark Sapiro said: Of course, but I suspect that the users who are astute/sophisticated enough to follow that link to the listinfo page, find and click the "Unsubscribe or edit options" button and then fill in their email address and click "Unsubscribe" on the options login page are not the ones the OP is concerned about. The ones I would be concerned about are the clue-free types who scream in ALL CAPS, and insist that it is my duty to respond to their every whim and to unsubscribe them from every mailing list in existence on the entire Internet, and that because the Mailman software is associated with Python and python.org, we must obviously be the morons who run the entire thing. Right. Those are the ones I tend to reserve my harshest punishment/criticism for. But I'm trying to be a more optimistic and positive person now (after my surgery for thyroid cancer), so I guess I need to change that. Maybe once they finally start me on the synthetic thyroid replacement drugs, and I feel like I've got some energy back. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Rewriting or identifying late bounces
on 7/8/09 6:12 PM, Stefan Förster said: Thanks for your advice, Brad. The problem is that, due to policy reasons, outgoing mail has to pass a content filter, running locally on the Mailman box. With VERP... Chuq von Rospach wrote some stuff in the FAQ detailing his experience with how VERP impacted performance on the systems he was managing. Of course, this doesn't necessarily apply directly to your case, but it is instructive to read. My recollection is that, in his case, he found that without VERP he got about two recipients per copy of each message transmitted -- due to the fact that some recipients are all on the same system and only one copy is sent to that system for multiple recipients, while others get unique copies because no one else is subscribed from that system. That meant that enabling VERP roughly doubled the number of copies of messages that had to be sent (so that each person is guaranteed to get their own personal unique copy), but that this didn't actually affect the overall performance very much (since so much of e-mail is I/O bound and waiting for the system at the other end to respond). However, enabling VERP also meant that it was now much, much easier for the system to automatically manage bounces (a.k.a., Non-Delivery Notices, or NDNs), delivery status notices (DSNs), etc This made overall management of the system much easier, and greatly reduced the amount of work that the system had to try to do to parse the bounces to try to figure out which recipient(s) it was in relation to. If you throw a content scanning system into that mix, most of the content of each of those mailing list messages will be the same, so depending on how that content scanning system is configured, it shouldn't be that much more expensive to process 100 virtually identical messages as it is to process the first message in that group. I guess I will simply move the list server to another computer (and a different network). OTOH, moving the mailing list function to a different server and separating that from the content scanning system is also a good idea, including lots of other reasons. Good luck, and I hope that this works out for you. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Rewriting or identifying late bounces
on 7/8/09 11:56 AM, Stefan Förster said: Bummer. There is no way to implement that, our mailing list server is already suffering from too much traffic, it's quite old hardware, after all. Take a look at the stuff on "performance tuning" in the FAQ. Even really old hardware can perform amazingly well, if it's tuned correctly. I guarantee that you would be astonished at what I can achieve with an ancient Compaq Pentium-133 laptop with 64MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive (upgraded from 1GB). If you've already done as much performance tuning as you can do, then obviously you're not going to squeeze any more blood out of that turnip. But I would suggest that you familiarize yourself with these sections to make sure that you're actually doing as much as you can. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Newbie question? Maybe not.
on 7/2/09 11:03 PM, Allen Sullivant said: I have a support ticket in with the hosting service (shared server, btw) but thought I would inquire here as well. Since you're using a hosted service, I don't know how much we'll be able to help. I suspect that you'll have to depend on your service provider for most things, but we might be able to give you some pointers as to things to talk to them about. For the moment, I would suggest that you have them review FAQ 4.78 at <http://wiki.list.org/x/A4E9> and answer the questions there. They should also be familiar with the more basic stuff discussed in the first section of the FAQ, starting with FAQ 1.22 at <http://wiki.list.org/x/PIA9>. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] email list
on 6/17/09 2:06 PM, Jaclyn said: The mailing list is called likewater-news mailing list, and was set up by Bruce Weber. We are now called the Tree of Life instead of Like Water. We'd really like to keep using it so any advice you have would be great! Thanks a lot. In your situation, what I would recommend is to find a reputable service provider that specializes in Mailman and Mailman-hosted mailing lists, and have them work with you to get your lists moved over to their services. There are several such providers on this list, and I'm sure that they will be more than happy to speak up here or to contact you directly. If you want any more specific advice, please let me know. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] openID enabled mailman
on 6/13/09 9:16 AM, Malveeka Tewari said: Can I also take a look at the code that the OpenID folks sent you? It'll be great if you can send me any pointers to that code. I asked on their mailing lists too but haven't received any promising response. They never made any attempt to build an OpenID provider in Mailman. All they did was hack in some OpenID Relyer code, and in the process they broke any other kind of authentication. Mailman is the wrong place to put an OpenID provider. That needs to go somewhere else, and then you can put in code that allows Mailman to be an OpenID Relyer. Looking at the code might give me an idea about how to start implementing openID support fr the mailman setup I am running, I really don't think so. They and you seem to have very different ideas as to where the OpenID provider code should go. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Who kicked the gate loose?
Jones, Scott (GE Money, consultant) wrote: Whence cometh the sudden flood of posts? I have been remiss in my duties as moderator for this list, and today I finally got the chance to try to catch up. I'll try to stay more current in the future. -- Brad Knowles Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the mailman-users and mailman-developers mailing lists -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Approve all held?
Alexx wrote: After googling and searching the list archives, haven't been able to find an answer to: how could I approve all messeages (around hundred of'em) held for moderation due to one reason or another? So far as I know, there is no method for doing this. You can discard all messages that are held for moderation, but there's no "approve all messages" option. You could always hack the source code yourself to add such a feature, if you were so inclined. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] openID enabled mailman
on 6/7/09 12:14 PM, Malveeka Tewari said: I want to know if there's already an openID enabled version of mailman available And what files would I need to make changes to include openID support in mailman The OpenID project uses Mailman themselves, and they have hacked it to allow OpenID logins. They even shared with us the code that they have. I took a look at trying to bring this into the main codebase, and I was not able to figure out how to do that -- when they put in OpenID, they broke everything else, and I could never figure out how to get the two to co-exist at the same time. IMO, this may be a better question to ask on their mailing lists, or to ask the people who maintain their mailing lists. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Will Mailman inform a sender of a bounced message that it was approved?
on 5/26/09 4:23 PM, Jane Frizzell said: Is there a feature in Mail Man that would notify the sender of a message, when it bounces for moderation, to be informed when it is cleared by the moderator? This person is not a member of the list so could not tell if it is eventually delivered. The standard version of Mailman can be configured to inform the sender that their message is being held for moderation, but there is no method I know of to configure it to notify the sender when the message has been released. I don't know what kind of source-code level modifications might be necessary to make that happen. -- Brad Knowles LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman mali list already created
on 5/18/09 5:41 PM, Noah said: I have the MAILMAN_SITE_LIST only defined in the Defaults.py program so I am unclear what is the problem. any other clues? Anything you put in Defaults.py will get wiped out by the next upgrade. If you want anything to survive into the next upgrade, you need to put that into mm_cfg.py instead. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Installation On Separate Server Plausible?
on 5/14/09 8:45 PM, Carlos Williams said: I am being told that my Postfix email server can no longer run Apache on the same physical server. The management has decided for specific reasons that Apache can only be installed and configured on the web server, not the mail server. The mail server will simply run Postfix / Dovecot. You can certainly configure Mailman to use your new mail-only server as the external mail interface to the world, but I think you're going to need to have some sort of mail server running on the web server machine, even if that mail server is not otherwise externally accessible. The reason is because of the way that messages are handed off to Mailman -- via e-mail. The only other solution I can see is to have your mail server and web server both mount and share the same file storage, so that the mail server can provide the message input to Mailman (as well as the archiving, mailing the messages back out to the subscribers, etc...), and the web server can provide the WebUI for interacting with Mailman. However, neither of these is an easy configuration to set up or maintain, at least not relative to the typical method. I think we've got some pointers on doing this kind of thing in the FAQ and in the archives of this list, but there may be some details which are not clear to you and will need further clarification. This will force me to move web mail (RoundCube) & MailMan to my web server! My question is can I have MailMan function from scratch (no data needs to be migrated to the new install) from my web server and work? You still need access to the data. You can't just install a web server on another machine and expect it to magically have all the data. And you still need to provide some way to update that data, and you still need some way to provide e-mail input and output to that system. There are a few ways to solve these issues, but each has a different set of trade-offs, etc.... -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Discarding defers from the command line
on 5/16/09 9:57 AM, Bernie Cosell said: I've been pushing on this some, to no avail at the moment. The simple part was finding the data directory, the wiki isn't exactly correct: on our install, at least, the data directory is in /var/lib/mailman. Then you're using a version of Mailman that was provided as part of a binary package from some other source, and not our canonical source-only distribution of Mailman. That's not necessarily a problem, but you do need to keep in mind that all our documentation and FAQs are written to the only standard we have, which is the original source code that we provide. We can't control what anyone else does with whatever they provide, nor can we write their documentation for them. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Patch for use of Postfix VERP support
on 5/14/09 7:58 PM, Mark Sapiro said: Normally, I would defer to you for all things MTA as your knowledge and experience in this area are far greater than mine, but I have been under the impression that if an MTA has two or more messages to deliver to the the same remote MX, that it can and perhaps will deliver them in one SMTP session as follows My understanding is that the issue here isn't so much the single SMTP connection, which may or may not get re-used, depending on the queueing strategy of the sender. If you want to increase your efficiency in this area, then you make sure that your submission actually just puts the message into the queue in deferred mode and doesn't make an immediate delivery attempt, and of course you turn off all spam and other access control checks on the outbound side, since you should have already done all those on inbound. You then allow later queue runs to come along and pick that up, along with any other messages bound for that destination. I think we cover this in the various "performance" articles in the FAQ Wiki. My understanding is that the issue here is whether or not the VERP'ed format will be understood and usable by Mailman if there is a bounce, and how many unique messages will be delivered, as opposed to how many connections will be created to deliver the messages. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Patch for use of Postfix VERP support
Fil wrote: As the emails are sent one by one the connection rate to these systems can get very high, and we get delayed. Ideas? Having postfix do your VERP'ing for you isn't going to help. Mailman needs to know what VERP was used going out, so that it can match that when the bounce comes back in. Even if you could patch Mailman so that it would automatically understand the postfix-style VERP and properly apply that, it still wouldn't help you. Delivering larger amounts of messages from Mailman to postfix and then having postfix do the VERP'ing isn't going to keep your delivery rates to remote sites at a lower level -- if anything, it's going to increase it. This is a postfix problem. Find the sites that cause the problems, and set up separate queues for them, with different parallelism and re-queueing/re-try schedules. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman appends hostname to some address on mail list
on 5/5/09 1:16 PM, Tom Tilmant said: It seems the problem has been resolved by the service provider. It appears that the host name of the server was not in the /etc/localdomains as required by mailman. They made the adjustment and the problems have gone away. Mailman doesn't require this file, but perhaps your MTA does. I am glad to hear that they were able to fix your problem for you. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Question and help
on 5/6/09 2:06 PM, Rodger Johnson said: configure: error: no acceptable cc found in $PATH You don't have a C compiler available in your path. You need to find out where the C compiler is and tell the configure script how to get to it, or if there is no C compiler on the system then you need to have one installed. When I run 'make' i get the following: [Rodger:~/mailman/mailman-2.1.9] rodgerjo% make make: Command not found. Looks like you don't have "make" installed either. Both are developers tools, and not typically installed in certain distributions, especially when you go for just the "base" install, as opposed to the full "everything-including-the-kitchen-sink" install. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Patch: Preserve Content-Transfer-Encoding when adding footer or scrubbing
on 5/5/09 12:44 PM, Petr Hroudný said: Please find the patches attached/scrubbed. Let me know your opinion about this. Yup, they were scrubbed alright. ;-) Seriously, discussions regarding patches to Mailman should be had on the mailman-developers list, and it would probably be a good idea to upload patches first to the tracker. However, we do greatly appreciate your effort in producing these patches, and this is a discussion that I think the developers would love to continue to have with you. Thanks! -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] mailman not receiving/sending mails
on 5/5/09 10:50 AM, kanika vats said: I think my mailman can not recieve or send mails .I have performed everything given in the installation guide but still facing such problems. Can anyone tell me what is going wrong in my case? Have you consulted FAQ 4.78 at <http://wiki.list.org/x/A4E9>? -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] HTML in messages. How?
on 5/7/09 11:42 AM, Denis Yurashkou said: Anybody tried to send HTML-messages with Mailman? How can I send message with HTML, that will be read as HTML, neither as text nor as attachment? Mailman is not a content generation system. It is a content filtering and distribution system. So, if you generate your content in HTML, and you do not have Mailman configured to strip or convert HTML, then that will be passed through to the recipients. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] How old is the Mailman project?
on 5/7/09 6:47 PM, alexan...@nautae.eti.br said: How old is the Mailman project? The first public mention of Mailman that I know of was at the 7th International Python Conference in November of 1998. See <http://www.python.org/workshops/1998-11/proceedings.html> and <http://myriadicity.net/Sundry/mailman_ip7.pdf>. There was also a talk given at the 12th LISA conference in December of 1998, see <http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa98/technical.html> and <http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/lisa98/full_papers/viega/viega_html/viega.html>. The official announcement of availability for version 1.0 was in July of 1999, see <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/1999-July/04.html>. Of course, development on Mailman preceded these dates by some time, as explained by Ken Manheimer at <http://myriadicity.net/Sundry/MyMailmanRole>. So, it all depends on what you want to choose as the official birthdate for Mailman. Is there any historical information? Where? The WikiPedia page at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Mailman> has some information and links to some other pages. I'm not aware of any other page that tries to gather together any of the early history of Mailman. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman appends hostname to some address on mail list
on 5/3/09 8:34 PM, Tom Tilmant said: 2009-05-03 13:27:54 [20088] 1M0iHw-0005Dq-2U => pers...@pacbell.net F= P= R=lookuphost T=remote_smtp S=4894 H=pbimail2.prodigy.net [207.115.21.23]:25 C="250 2.0.0 n43KRqOE012511 Message accepted for delivery" QT=2s DT=2s That looks like qmail. I'm not sure there are many people on this list who know anything about qmail. 2009-05-03 16:12:52 [20088] H=localhost (myhost.DOMAIN.com) [127.0.0.1]:45816 I=[127.0.0.1]:25 F= temporarily rejected RCPT : Could not complete sender verify Looks like they tried to do Sender Address Verification, which is a really bad idea (see <http://taint.org/2007/03/16/134743a.html>). Regardless, they are configured to do SAV, and your system didn't verify that address as valid (which is not uncommon for qmail, IIRC), so your message failed to be accepted. There's not much you can do about this, unless you can get the recipient system to stop doing SAV, or you can fix your qmail installation to actually validate those addresses. Like I said, I don't know that there's anyone here who understands much about qmail. My service provider claims not to support mailman any longer all through its still part of the Cpanel install. IMO, if you're using cPanel, and your service provider is no longer providing support for the system you're using, then you've got the wrong service provider. There are some service providers that are active on this mailing list, and I'm sure one or more of them would be more than happy to talk to you about your requirements and whether or not they could help you move your services to a different system where you can actually get the support you should be getting. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] alternative to setgid
on 5/4/09 5:44 PM, Mark Sapiro said: I have determined that mailman is being NFS mounted on the web server with the nosuid option and I can't for the life of me figure out how to make it mount with the suid option set.. I don't know the answer to that, but my guess is that it will be easier to find this answer than to work around it. That should be pretty simple. Just remove the "nosuid" option from the list of mount options. If there is no "nosuid" option in your list of mount options, then the filesystem is being exported as "nosuid" by the fileserver, and you'll have to talk to the administrator of the fileserver to see if they will change that for you. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Target individual list member with sub-addressing when sending?
on 4/28/09 1:14 AM, Charles Rosenberg said: After receiving a message through the “reply-to” address, I want the original poster to be able to send a single message back to the “replier,” possibly answering some question. Problem: I can’t have the “poster” know the individual address of the “replier,” nor can I have the “replier” know the direct address of the “poster.” Would it be possible to use some sort of sub-addressing, extended addressing, plus addressing, etc. to send a message to an individual subscriber based on a “subscriber” username or something? For example sending to australia+kenyamagu...@lists.seishinonline.jp would cause the e-mail to only go to the subscriber associated with “KenYamaguchi” and NOT the whole list. This way, neither side knows the other’s “direct mail address.” Is this possible? Thanks in advance. You're talking about something we call an "anonymizer". Mailman can do that to a limited degree, but only in one direction -- you permanently strip out the identifiable information about the sender, and then post the message to the list. There's no way to get that information back. If you want a two-way anonymizing system, that is something you would have to implement outside of Mailman. There are such systems in existence elsewhere, but it is very tricky to get these sorts of things right, and you really want to make sure you do get them right in cases like this -- you don't want some stalker to be able to get information about host families or prospective students and then be able to use that to cause harm to them. I'd suggest that you go find some of those two-way anonymizing systems and you talk to them about how you might be able to set them up alongside a mailing list system, and how they could potentially be used in conjunction with the mailing list system. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Cluster of postfix
on 4/18/09 10:23 AM, Juan Antonio Cuesta said: i used the NFS shared files. A day the Nas Server crashed and my smtp servers could not work normaly. I had the conf files and the all db files. I think you sent this to the wrong list. The message you are responding to appears more likely to have been on the postfix-users mailing list. I have a great deal of respect for what Victor Duchovni has to say about postfix, but so far as I know he is not a subscriber to this list, and I don't recall seeing any such discussion recently on this list. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Sending bulk mail (400,000 users)
on 4/17/09 11:45 PM, Phoenix Kiula said: Yes. It's called "Full Personalization" How can I enable it? I went into the mailman in cpanel and did not find this setting in the "Non Digest" section. Then I read the faq - http://www.list.org/faq.html - and there's no information on "full personalization". The FAQ has been moved. We need to clean up those old links. The new location for the FAQ is <http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions>. If you use the search function for "personalization", you should have the answer as it applies to the standard version of Mailman as we provide from <http://www.list.org/download.html>. However, note that cPanel has made some changes to the code they ship. See FAQ 6.11 at <http://wiki.list.org/x/sYA9> for more information. If cpanel uses an old version of mailman, or if it blocks the "full personalization" feature, how can I manually enable it in the config file or somethng? That's really a question you need to be asking your service provider. They're the ones who installed cPanel, and they should have those answers for you. I will tell you this -- I don't think you're going to handle anywhere remotely close to the number of users you're talking about with a cPanel installation. If you want to get those levels of performance, you're going to need a more customized installation and you're going to need to have full privileged access to the server and the MTA, as well as full site admin access. Either that, or a service provider who is willing and able to do all these things for you -- and anyone running cPanel is highly unlikely to fit into that picture. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Archive 3rd Party List
on 4/17/09 11:31 AM, Jim Redman said: I subscribe to a mailing list that has no archive capabilities. I don't really want to try to take over the list, but would like to archive the messages as a service to other list users. Would it be possible to do this with Mailman? Or does anyone have an alternate system that may be better capable to do this? You could set up a local Mailman mailing list that is a subscriber to the parent list, and it could provide archives. However, that sort of thing is generally frowned upon by the people who run the mailing lists, so you should check with them first. And to make sure that your system couldn't be abused to send spam through to the parent list, you'd have some security work you'd need to do to lock things down. And if the parent list is also using Mailman, or some other package that also does things like send to you the password you need to access or modify your subscription options, then be advised that those things would get posted to your little archive system and then anyone else who wanted to could read those messages and go change your settings without your knowledge or approval. It's certainly do-able, but you probably want to spend some time to think everything all the way through before you go down this route. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Sending bulk mail (400,000 users)
on 4/11/09 11:08 AM, Phoenix Kiula said: Hi. I need to send annoucements to a large opt-in list. Having never done this before and not being now confident if PHP's mail() can manage it, I was pointed to mailman. My questions: For all your questions, I would encourage you to first visit our FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3>. There is a decent search function, and the FAQ is broken down by various sections. (1) Is it possible for mailman to send emails where the "to:" header has the email of a specific recipient? It's more personal than sending to a common email address. Mailman has some personalization options, yes. For more details, see the FAQ. (2) Secondly, on a 2GB memory server with fast SATA hard disks, is sending email to 400,000 users possible with mailman? Will it automatically take care of delays etc between batches of sending? There are too many factors involved to be able to say for sure. Try searching the FAQ for "performance". I will say that what you're talking about is not out of the realm of possibility, and might even be reasonably easy to do, with the right MTA with the right configuration, etc But there are far too many other variables to be able to give a blanket statement based on such few facts. That said, coming on this list and asking for advice on how to send to a claimed opt-in list of 400k users might be considered by some people to be a bit suspicious. We've had some not-so-bright spammers come on here before to try to get us to help them send out their effluent faster, and I think we have successfully discouraged the less intelligent ones away. I would encourage you to be really, really sure that the list in question is truly 100% confirmed double opt-in, and not just some spammer list that is being imported from some other provider because they got kicked off. There are responsible e-mail marketing resources I can point you to that can help you with these kinds of tasks, if you're interested. I don't mean to offend, but you should understand that it can be difficult to tell the difference between a spammer who is pretending to be a white hat, and a real white hat who just has a large-ish job to do. (3) How can I make sure that the emails sent honor my DNZ zone records and pick up my SPF settings, and my Domain Keys? Or is that something the receiver's email client does as long as these are validly published on my domain? All of those things are external to Mailman. It would be up to your MTA to make sure that all outbound mail conforms to the appropriate standards, and up to the recipient MTAs to ensure that they perform the appropriate functions relative to those standards. I can tell you right now that not all of those recipient servers will act appropriately. You're going to have to decide how you're going to handle that. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Detailed Flowchart
on 4/11/09 11:26 AM, vi...@wlcr.net said: Where can I get a detailed flowchart of the Mailman program? I don't think there is one. You could probably write a program in Python to parse the Python code and to generate such a flowchart. Short of that, I have no idea what kind of solutions might be available to you. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Soft bounces....
on 4/6/09 10:38 AM, Charles Gregory said: Personal, Commercial, Listmail. I can see their point. If listmail tries to send mail to a 5xx address for a couple of days, that 'lowers the reputation' of that IP more than when a personal mail gets a 5xx and the human sending it doesn't send any more mail to that address How do you know what is personal and what is commercial? I assume you can detect what is listmail by looking at the message or certain other factors This is the second postfix capability (the other was 'separate queues') that has been referenced that I find interesting. Could you kindly point me to a decent manual/doc/faq for either of these? Particularly adjusting sending IP according to sender address would be VERY cool (Or please reply personally if you think a quick reply would suffice. I don't want to clutter the list with OT material). Basically, you're looking to set up special postfix transport maps. A couple of examples are discussed at <http://www.postfix.org/QSHAPE_README.html>, but I'm sure the documentation, the FAQ, and the archives of the postfix-users mailing list would have a lot more examples that might be more useful to you. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] setting up the mailing list
on 4/5/09 8:07 AM, Rasa Isaacson said: Is there something analogous in mailman to associate a personal email account with the generic account on incoming posts to the board? Like an alias, but looking at the "From:" field and translating it to the generic account like presid...@ourwebsite.org. Unfortunately, no. The best you could do would be to have the senders configure their mail programs so that when they send official messages, they can choose to send them from their official account. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Unable to receive Zimbra-generated mail forwarded by Mailman
on 4/3/09 1:50 PM, Pete Smith said: I suspect that this might not be the right list for this question, but I have an odd problem that seems to be Mailman related. In a nutshell, the body of an e-mail sent by a Zimbra Webclient through a Mailman list server is unreadable with Eudora 7.1. In most cases, these sorts of things occur when one side or the other is generating a non-standard HTML format, when then gets modified by Mailman in a standard manner, and the results are ... unpleasant. I have one such set of e-mails, with full headers, available for anyone who is interested in this problem, but I won't clog up the list with it. Feel free to send me a copy and I'll see if I can figure out what went wrong. If I can't help you, then maybe Mark Sapiro can (since he's the lead developer of the 2.1 and 2.2 branches of Mailman). -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] New to the List Serve - responding to posts issue
on 4/3/09 1:29 PM, Robert McGuire said: I just setup a list serve for my community's board of directors. I have all of the permissions set correctly and only the board are members. Everyone in community are non-members where their posts are held for approval. Someone is going to say it, so I'll try to be as nice as I can about it. I'm sure you're new to this software, but "ListServ" is actually a particular brand of mailing list software, but it's not our brand. Here in the Mailman community, we don't call them a "list serve". We call them mailing lists. I hope that by being the first to say this, I can pre-empt anyone else from being ... not so understanding. My issues is: When someone on the list responds to a post, their response comes from their personal email address. If the request originator does not "reply to all", then the list serve is cut out of the loop. My question is: For members of the list, is there a way for them to respond directly from the list serve? That way the address that responses come from are always the list serve address and not their personal address. There are ways to force all replies to go back to the mailing list, yes. However, the Mailman developers are pretty strongly opposed to using these methods in most cases -- this tends to lead to public exposure of messages that were meant to be sent privately, and that can be far, far more damaging than the reverse. I've even seen experienced mail systems administrators with twenty-plus years of experience make this mistake. And accidentally expose proprietary details of a product that should not have been publicly mentioned, at least not yet. If you can convince me that you've got a case where this kind of thing isn't an issue, I'll be glad to point you to the documentation that discusses this subject. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] [-0.5] Re: Soft bounces....
on 4/3/09 9:34 AM, Charles Gregory said: Further to this topic, another suggestion from Yahoo would be to use different IP addresses for different classes of mail. Short of running the mail on a separate server, I was thinking I might try running a separate instance of postfix to send mail from a separate IP. But then how would I tell mailman to use *that* instance of postfix? What do they mean "different classes" of mail? If you're using postfix, it should be easy enough to tell it to use a given IP address when transmitting mail to yahoo.com, and use a different address when transmitting to anywhere else. Likewise, if you want to identify different classes of mail and have them sent through different IP addresses, that should also be possible -- so long as you can identify what is meant by "different classes" of mail. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Soft bounces....
on 4/3/09 8:50 AM, Charles Gregory said: I use postfix, so the performance of yahoo delivery doesn't really impact other mail, other than the impact of the extra load of retries... If you're using postfix, then that makes things even simpler -- by creating a separate queue for only mail to yahoo.com, you can have different queue retry rules. For example, you could retry them less frequently, and hold them for shorter periods of time, or whatever it is that the guys at yahoo want you to do. There's lots of reasons to set up separate queues for large partner domains. -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Testing, checking
Mark Sapiro wrote: Port 25 for incoming mail and ports 80/443 for incoming http/https are all you need. Is your router forwarding those ports to the Mailman machine? Is 75.145.58.209 (the A record address for fyrenice.com and mail.fyrenice.com) the IP address of the router. Is there any other firewall involved? Maybe the ISP is blocking inbound port 25 and/or 80/443? -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9
Re: [Mailman-Users] Debugging question
on 4/2/09 9:11 AM, Whit Blauvelt said: Since "Downloading and Installing" and "Integration Issues" are also tasks for the site administrator, would it make better sense to also break out sections on "Debugging," "Site Upgrades," and perhaps "Mods"? Or maybe to fold thse all under "Site Administrator Tasks" but have that all subsectioned logically, rather than a mostly-random list? Problem is, what makes sense for one person doesn't necessarily make sense for someone else. What's there is not as well organized as it could be, but from my perspective it's not so horribly bad. That said, perhaps there is some middle ground that might be more useful than what we have now, and would make sense to a broader group of people. IMO, what would be really useful would be a tagging-based system, so that a single entry could show up in multiple "sections". But I think that would mean either a complete re-write of the wiki code itself, or at least a substantial change to the way we use the wiki. I'm not sure that either of those are feasible in the short term. I know - it's a wiki and presumably I could jump in and rearrange stuff. I'd do that, if there's a sense that it's appropriate and no one with real expertise on Mailman wants to take it on. I'd say that you have the power to make whatever changes you think should be made, and if we don't like them then we can revert to earlier versions. So, feel free to hack away! -- Brad Knowles If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out LinkedIn Profile: my friend bigsbytracks on YouTube at <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>http://preview.tinyurl.com/bigsbytracks -- Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9