Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Lindsay Haisley writes:

 > Courier doesn't need milters.  Maildrop can be run in what's called
 > "embedded mode" which is effectively the same thing.

No, it's not the same, not for the purpose of deciding whether
*Courier* needs milters.  *You* don't need milters because you don't
mind eating the occasional slice of Spam.  But you need to keep those
concepts separate, or you're going to confuse the heck out of those of
us who do care care about *every* spam we SMTP accept (not to mention
yanking on Brad's "do it in the MTA" chain).

 > Courier could easily be configured to keep reject identified spam
 > in SMTP, but as it is, people are more comfortable having the
 > option to examine it and adjust their filtering levels accordingly.

Sure, I do that too, but also avail myself of the option to SMTP
reject SpamAssassin scores >15 (which actually does happen quite
frequently even after RBL).

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 19:35 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > Courier doesn't need milters.  Maildrop can be run in what's called
>  > "embedded mode" which is effectively the same thing.
> x`
> No, it's not the same, not for the purpose of deciding whether
> *Courier* needs milters.

A "milter" is just an MTA component/plugin that reflects user-space
(outside the MTA) decisions on spam/viruses back to the SMTP dialog so
that a receiving server can reject an email for cause without generating
a backscatter email to the envelope sender.  Maildrop in embedded mode
_is_ a milter - a highly programmable one.  Using maildrop, an email can
be fed to any program for analysis - shell script, SpamAssassin, etc. -
which need not be SMTP-aware, and the output and exit code of said
program can be used to determine the course of an SMTP session.

Yes, it's desirable when possible to reject problem email at the front
door, but it's not a religion with me.  I've done my time in the
spam-fighting trenches, probably more than most mail admins.  I do
understand email pretty well, and know how to implement decisions I make
about how to handle problem email.  It's just these decisions are
probably not the same ones you'd make.  

I'm not going to change my fundamental decisions on how I handle problem
emails on my system, which aren't doctrinaire and may not be
e-politically-correct by some standards, but I've kept this thread going
because I rather selfishly find that occasionally someone tosses out a
Good Idea that I may be able to use :-)

BTW, as I mentioned, about 80% of the spam _I_ (personally) get is
rejected by courier based on RBL lookups, and I assume the percentage is
similar for other system users.  I have a cron job which generates a
daily report on these rejections for me, and anyone else who wants one.
The number of rejections I see in the report for my personal email
varies between about 200 and 800 or so a day, and has remained in this
range for several years.  Frankly, I don't believe rejecting an SMTP
transaction out front makes one whit of difference to spammers, and I've
seen no arguments to indicate that it does.  A huge amount of this spew
comes from Asia, Russia, South America, and my guess is that it's either
coming from virally infected / hacked boxes or from rogue servers that
crank out terabytes of this crap, and in any case the people sending it
don't give a damn whether any particular target (victim!) system rejects
1% or 99% of it.  

It's just that, by rejecting this stuff out front, one gets the visceral
satisfaction of knowing that some spammer, somewhere _might_ be annoyed
or inconvenienced by seeing the bounce notices from their server.  I've
heard all the arguments about CPU usage and system load involved in
accepting and processing spam, but my service is a relatively small one
and my system load generally runs under 1.0, even with all that spam
coming in :)

-- 
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[Mailman-Users] CC's, replies

[Lindsay Haisley]

Steven, J.A., others,

Thank's for some good ideas re. spam management implementation.  I do
have one request.  When you reply to one of my posts on this list,
please don't CC me, or reply to me and CC the list.  I'm on the list so
I get a copy of everything you post.  I don't need two of them :-)

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FMP Computer Services |   toasters, but we   |  available at
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http://www.fmp.com|toast"|
  |(Cheryl Dehut)|


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[Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

Good Morning,

Last night our colo came down for routine maintenace, when 
everything came back up, I noticed a *really* strange issue:

listowner address sends a "Maintenance Over" message to a bunch of 
machines/lists.

On one machine with 4 lists, owneraddress posting shows up in archives, 
but owner never sees copy, nor any postings from this list (while shecking 
archives I realized the list was very active, but I was not seeing the 
posts being distributed).

Looking in logs/smtp, I see no sign of the messages from owner that are 
clearly in the archives!  In logs/error, I see that when the machine came 
up there are intermittent errors that look like:

Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 2] No such 
file or directory: 
'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.pck'
Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 100, in 
_oneloop
msg, msgdata = self._switchboard.dequeue(filebase)
  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Switchboard.py", line 154, 
in dequeue
fp = open(filename)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.pck'

Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Skipping and preserving unparseable message: 
1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf
Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Failed to unlink/preserve backup file: 
/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.bak
Dec 20 03:04:13 2008 (412) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 2] No such 
file or directory: 
'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/commands/1229763852.582849+9e25777e9465de03f3615d9fdad3976458c49d2c.pck'
Dec 20 03:04:13 2008 (412) Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 100, in 
_oneloop
msg, msgdata = self._switchboard.dequeue(filebase)
  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Switchboard.py", line 154, 
in dequeue
fp = open(filename)
IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/commands/1229763852.582849+9e25777e9465de03f3615d9fdad3976458c49d2c.pck'

but nothing like that anywhere around the time of my "We're up, right?" 
test posts.

logs/bounce has no sign of trouble.
logs/smtp-failure is empty
logs/qrunner says:
Dec 20 11:04:22 2008 (5424) ArchRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:22 2008 (5425) BounceRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5430) VirginRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5427) IncomingRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5428) NewsRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5429) OutgoingRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5431) RetryRunner qrunner started.
Dec 20 11:04:23 2008 (5426) CommandRunner qrunner started.
logs/mischief is empty
logs/postfix is empty

I'm just lost.  It looks like everyone but listowner is getting through: I 
see replies.

I did a quick check_perm, and we're fine..

Help?

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xpgp_key_mgmt_is_broken-dont_bother

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer
1907 Speech
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 11:30 -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> listowner address sends a "Maintenance Over" message to a bunch of 
> machines/lists.

It's not coming from Mailman.  Are your list/list-owner addresses
possibly referenced in a boot script?

> On one machine with 4 lists, owneraddress posting shows up in archives, 
> but owner never sees copy, nor any postings from this list (while shecking 
> archives I realized the list was very active, but I was not seeing the 
> posts being distributed).

I assume you're subscribed, and your traffic turned on.  Just because
you're the list owner doesn't mean you get the list traffic.

> 
> Looking in logs/smtp, I see no sign of the messages from owner that are 
> clearly in the archives!  In logs/error, I see that when the machine came 
> up there are intermittent errors that look like:
> 
> Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 2] No such 
> file or directory: 
> '/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.pck'

'/usr/home/crippen/' is very non-standard FSH.  Normally one would
expect '/home/crippen'.  Is this actually how things are configured?

-- 
Lindsay Haisley   | "Everything works| PGP public key
FMP Computer Services |   if you let it" |  available at
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http://www.fmp.com|  |



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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Lindsay Haisley wrote:

> On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 11:30 -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > listowner address sends a "Maintenance Over" message to a bunch of 
> > machines/lists.
> 
> It's not coming from Mailman.  Are your list/list-owner addresses
> possibly referenced in a boot script?

No.

> > On one machine with 4 lists, owneraddress posting shows up in archives, 
> > but owner never sees copy, nor any postings from this list (while shecking 
> > archives I realized the list was very active, but I was not seeing the 
> > posts being distributed).
> 
> I assume you're subscribed, and your traffic turned on.  Just because
> you're the list owner doesn't mean you get the list traffic.

Yes, yes, etc. Allow me to reiterate: Everyone seems to be OK *except* the 
listowner.  I checked that I was still subbed and not being caught in a 
discard file.  Also recall, the other 3 lists do capture and forward the 
listowner.  It's just ONE list out of four doing this.

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xpgp_key_mgmt_is_broken-dont_bother

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer
1907 Speech
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[Mailman-Users] [2] Re: Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

Since it's apparently not clear: this is a long existing and well behaved 
mailman installation prior to today.

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xpgp_key_mgmt_is_broken-dont_bother

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer
1907 Speech
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 12:06 -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> 
> > On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 11:30 -0600, J.A. Terranson wrote:
> > > listowner address sends a "Maintenance Over" message to a bunch of 
> > > machines/lists.
> > 
> > It's not coming from Mailman.  Are your list/list-owner addresses
> > possibly referenced in a boot script?
> 
> No.

I tend to use grep like a local google lookup, and find a lot of
problems this way.  If "Maintenance Over" is a phrase in the message,
grep -R for it in /etc, /usr/sbin, other likely places (and go have a
cup of coffee while you're waiting!)  Locating the text file or program
from which something originates generally helps.

> > > On one machine with 4 lists, owneraddress posting shows up in archives, 
> > > but owner never sees copy, nor any postings from this list (while 
> > > shecking 
> > > archives I realized the list was very active, but I was not seeing the 
> > > posts being distributed).
> > 
> > I assume you're subscribed, and your traffic turned on.  Just because
> > you're the list owner doesn't mean you get the list traffic.
> 
> Yes, yes, etc. Allow me to reiterate: Everyone seems to be OK *except* the 
> listowner.  I checked that I was still subbed and not being caught in a 
> discard file.  Also recall, the other 3 lists do capture and forward the 
> listowner.  It's just ONE list out of four doing this.

Thanks for clarifying, but it's still not clear.  Do you mean the
list-ow...@domain.name address is subbed to the list, or the address to which
list-owner points is on the list?  Are you saying that email explicitly
addressed to list-ow...@domain.name for the problem list doesn't make it
through to the referenced address(es), or just that _list traffic_ isn't
properly delivered to this address?

-- 
Lindsay Haisley 
FMP Computer Services

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>Looking in logs/smtp, I see no sign of the messages from owner that are 
>clearly in the archives!  In logs/error, I see that when the machine came 
>up there are intermittent errors that look like:
>
>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 2] No such 
>file or directory: 
>'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.pck'
>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 100, in 
>_oneloop
>msg, msgdata = self._switchboard.dequeue(filebase)
>  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Switchboard.py", line 154, 
>in dequeue
>fp = open(filename)
>IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
>'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.pck'



This comnes from multiple qrunners serving the same queue slice. See
the FAQ at .


>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Skipping and preserving unparseable message: 
>1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf


This may be an unparseable message. It got preserved for analysis in
qfiles/shunt (2.1.10) or qfiles/bad (2.1.11). view it with bin/dumpdb
-p or bin/show_qfiles/. It's name is the string in the message with a
.psv extension.


>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Failed to unlink/preserve backup file: 
>/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.bak


This is probably the multiple qrunner issue.


>Dec 20 03:04:13 2008 (412) Uncaught runner exception: [Errno 2] No such 
>file or directory: 
>'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/commands/1229763852.582849+9e25777e9465de03f3615d9fdad3976458c49d2c.pck'
>Dec 20 03:04:13 2008 (412) Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 100, in 
>_oneloop
>msg, msgdata = self._switchboard.dequeue(filebase)
>  File "/usr/home/crippen/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Switchboard.py", line 154, 
>in dequeue
>fp = open(filename)
>IOError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 
>'/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/commands/1229763852.582849+9e25777e9465de03f3615d9fdad3976458c49d2c.pck'


And this too.


I don't know if these issues are related to your missing messages or
not, but you need to resolve the multiple qrunners (seems that Mailman
is being started twice in a reboot) and see what the preserved message
is.

-- 
Mark Sapiro The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] CC's, replies

[Mark Sapiro]

Lindsay Haisley wrote:
>
>I do
>have one request.  When you reply to one of my posts on this list,
>please don't CC me, or reply to me and CC the list.  I'm on the list so
>I get a copy of everything you post.  I don't need two of them :-)


People reply-all to list posts for various reasons. One very good
reason is it keeps posters "in the loop" even if they are digest
subscribers.

If you set your list options to "nodups" ("Avoid duplicate copies of
messages?" on the user options page) you will not receive the message
from the list if your subscribed address is in To: or Cc:, and if the
address is in Cc: it will be removed from the Cc: in the post sent
from the list.

-- 
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San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Lindsay Haisley wrote:

> Thanks for clarifying, but it's still not clear.  Do you mean the
> list-ow...@domain.name address is subbed to the list, or the address to which
> list-owner points is on the list?  

Good point.  LO in this case is just an address at another domain, on 
another box, past a different segment.

> Are you saying that email explicitly
> addressed to list-ow...@domain.name for the problem list doesn't make it
> through to the referenced address(es), or just that _list traffic_ isn't
> properly delivered to this address?

Traffic from 1 of the 4 lists is no longer going to LO address.  Likely 
coincidental, however, I would normally expect a user complaining of this 
to have bounces, which I see not for LO.

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xpgp_key_mgmt_is_broken-dont_bother

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

Joseph Pulitzer
1907 Speech
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

Mark Sapiro wrote:

>J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Skipping and preserving unparseable message: 
>>1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf
>
>
>This may be an unparseable message. It got preserved for analysis in
>qfiles/shunt (2.1.10) or qfiles/bad (2.1.11). view it with bin/dumpdb
>-p or bin/show_qfiles/. It's name is the string in the message with a
>.psv extension.
>
>
>>Dec 20 01:35:17 2008 (633) Failed to unlink/preserve backup file: 
>>/usr/home/crippen/mailman/qfiles/virgin/1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.bak
>
>
>This is probably the multiple qrunner issue.


Actually, the above seems a bit more complicated. The original message
is in the virgin queue so should never be unparseable. It may all be a
qrunner race issue. I.e. some VirginRunner other than PID 633
processed the message and when PID 633 tried to preserve it, the other
runner instance had already removed it, but that doesn't explain why
PID 633 found it unparseable in the first place. Does
1229758515.53407+f7dd7f3e72a65eb8764166694ac958f0d9335dcf.psv exist in
qfiles/shunt or qfiles/bad?

-- 
Mark Sapiro The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:

>
>On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
>
>> Thanks for clarifying, but it's still not clear.  Do you mean the
>> list-ow...@domain.name address is subbed to the list, or the address to which
>> list-owner points is on the list?  
>
>Good point.  LO in this case is just an address at another domain, on 
>another box, past a different segment.
>
>> Are you saying that email explicitly
>> addressed to list-ow...@domain.name for the problem list doesn't make it
>> through to the referenced address(es), or just that _list traffic_ isn't
>> properly delivered to this address?
>
>Traffic from 1 of the 4 lists is no longer going to LO address.  Likely 
>coincidental, however, I would normally expect a user complaining of this 
>to have bounces, which I see not for LO.


You still haven't explicitly answered the question. Is the "address at
another domain, on another box, past a different segment" a member of
the list or is it just the owner. If it is the owner, but not a list
member, exactly what messages is it not getting that it should be
getting?

-- 
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San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> You still haven't explicitly answered the question. Is the "address at
> another domain, on another box, past a different segment" a member of
> the list or is it just the owner. If it is the owner, but not a list
> member, exactly what messages is it not getting that it should be
> getting?

I stated in the original post that LO was also subbed.  LO is getting 
everything (requests, other list traffic, etc) *except* traffic from list 
1.  But posts sent to list 1 show up in the archives of list 1:
http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/01.html
http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/02.html

-- 
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sysadmin_at_mfn.org
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plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Brad Knowles]

on 12/20/08 10:41 AM, Lindsay Haisley said:


A "milter" is just an MTA component/plugin that reflects user-space
(outside the MTA) decisions on spam/viruses back to the SMTP dialog so
that a receiving server can reject an email for cause without generating
a backscatter email to the envelope sender.


That is one possible description of a milter, yes.

But that does not describe all possible milters, no.


You are correct that milters sit outside of the MTA itself, but their 
purpose is to provide different tools to the "mail filter" process than 
are normally available inside the MTA itself.  What those different 
tools are will depend on the milter.


Some of them are seriously anal about checking exact conformance to the 
way certain headers are supposed to be used, because a certain class of 
spam tends to get these headers wrong in subtle ways.


Some of them will check the NS records of the domain of the sending MTA, 
or the whois registration of the network of the sending MTA, so that you 
can ban entire classes of senders based on whether or not they share the 
same nameserver as known spammers (because spammers tend to re-use the 
same nameservers over and over again, regardless of how many thousands 
or millions of domains they register), or they tend to re-use the same 
network registrars.


Some milters will use tools like "p0f" to do a passive OS check on the 
incoming connection (much like the OS determination techniques used in 
nmap, but using purely passive means), and then take one of several 
different actions based on what kind of machine is making the incoming 
connection -- reject them outright if they're running an OS you don't 
like (since >99% of all spam comes from Windows boxes, this can be a 
huge win all by itself), or maybe put them into a tarpit (to make them 
use up their resources), or whatever.


Milters can do virtually anything, in any way they want.  You can write 
your own milters in Perl or any other language you want.



Unfortunately, milters are not widely supported outside of modern 
versions of sendmail and postfix.



BTW, as I mentioned, about 80% of the spam _I_ (personally) get is
rejected by courier based on RBL lookups, and I assume the percentage is
similar for other system users.  I have a cron job which generates a
daily report on these rejections for me, and anyone else who wants one.


I have my own scripts that I've written for the same purpose.  Your 
statistics do not accurately describe the situation that I personally see.



At UT Austin, we reject ~95% of all incoming mail at the SMTP dialog 
level, because we use Ironport e-mail security appliances that check the 
incoming connection against the SenderBase reputation system, and 
SenderBase has several hundred different inputs that are used to 
calculate an overall score for that sender.  They monitor all the major 
RBLs (and a lot that you've never heard of), but they also consider what 
the registered nameservers are for the sending domain, who the 
registered owner of the network is in whois, and all those other things 
that you might want to check.


We reject another ~2% of the total with content-based checks.


The number of rejections I see in the report for my personal email
varies between about 200 and 800 or so a day, and has remained in this
range for several years.  Frankly, I don't believe rejecting an SMTP
transaction out front makes one whit of difference to spammers, and I've
seen no arguments to indicate that it does.


Do some research on the economics of spam, and how these guys get their 
money.  It is an entire black economy, and they get paid based on their 
deliverability, just like any other bulk mail service.



  A huge amount of this spew
comes from Asia, Russia, South America, and my guess is that it's either
coming from virally infected / hacked boxes or from rogue servers that
crank out terabytes of this crap, and in any case the people sending it
don't give a damn whether any particular target (victim!) system rejects
1% or 99% of it.


Some care, some don't.  But you don't know in advance which type of 
spammer you have connecting to you.



It's just that, by rejecting this stuff out front, one gets the visceral
satisfaction of knowing that some spammer, somewhere _might_ be annoyed
or inconvenienced by seeing the bounce notices from their server.  I've
heard all the arguments about CPU usage and system load involved in
accepting and processing spam, but my service is a relatively small one
and my system load generally runs under 1.0, even with all that spam
coming in :)


If more people rejected spam outright during the SMTP dialog, we would 
make a measurable impact on the spammer economy.  So long as there are 
plenty of people who are happy to just throw it away after-the-fact, 
then the spammers continue to win.


--
Brad Knowles
If you like Jazz/R&B guitar, check out
LinkedIn Profile: my 

Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>I stated in the original post that LO was also subbed.


Sorry. I missed that. I was more focussed on your multiple qrunners (my
diagnosis) issue, and then I skipped ahead.

Have you resolved the multiple qrunners?


>LO is getting 
>everything (requests, other list traffic, etc) *except* traffic from list 
>1.  But posts sent to list 1 show up in the archives of list 1:
>http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/01.html
>http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/02.html


Since the list is currently active, presumably others are receiving its
posts.

Is delivery enabled for the owner's subscribed address on list 1?

-- 
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San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> >I stated in the original post that LO was also subbed.
> 
> 
> Sorry. I missed that. I was more focussed on your multiple qrunners (my
> diagnosis) issue, and then I skipped ahead.
> 
> Have you resolved the multiple qrunners?

Yes, with work.  there multiples running (5)?  I don't know how or why, 
but there were 5 full instantiations running.  Killed everything by hand 
(mailmanctl stop was useless), and restarted it and everything *seems* OK 
now.

The files referenced were nowhere to be found, so picking them apart is a 
non starter.  Looks like a race condition: Does mailman not check to see 
if it's already running?

> >LO is getting 
> >everything (requests, other list traffic, etc) *except* traffic from list 
> >1.  But posts sent to list 1 show up in the archives of list 1:
> >http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/01.html
> >http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/02.html
> 
> 
> Since the list is currently active, presumably others are receiving its
> posts.

Yep.

> Is delivery enabled for the owner's subscribed address on list 1?
Also mentioned in the first post: yes.

This was a really odd event.  I'm pretty surprised to find 5 copies 
happily beating each other up without checking.  Could this be a build 
issue (FreeBSD - I know there are reported "difficulties" here)< or does 
MM not check?

Thanks for the guidance!

//Alif

-- 
Yours,
J.A. Terranson
sysadmin_at_mfn.org
0xpgp_key_mgmt_is_broken-dont_bother

"Never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public
plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to
the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always
be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by
predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty."

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1907 Speech
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 13:13 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
> Unfortunately, milters are not widely supported outside of modern 
> versions of sendmail and postfix.

Courier's maildrop implements a perl-like structured scripting language
that's about as flexible as anything I'm aware of for this purpose.  Any
program that generates output and an exit code can be executed from a
maildrop script and the results analyzed and appropriate action taken.

> > BTW, as I mentioned, about 80% of the spam _I_ (personally) get is
> > rejected by courier based on RBL lookups, and I assume the percentage is
> > similar for other system users.  I have a cron job which generates a
> > daily report on these rejections for me, and anyone else who wants one.
> 
> I have my own scripts that I've written for the same purpose.  Your 
> statistics do not accurately describe the situation that I personally see.

Well I'm probably not doing as effective a job of pre-filtering as you
are at UT.  I've looked a bit at the stats for other users on FMP's
servers and what I see for myself is in the same ballpark.  Mind you,
I'm only using about 6 RBL lists.  _Most_ of the catches are from the
CBL, .  

> At UT Austin, we reject ~95% of all incoming mail at the SMTP dialog 
> level, because we use Ironport e-mail security appliances that check the 
> incoming connection against the SenderBase reputation system, and 
> SenderBase has several hundred different inputs that are used to 
> calculate an overall score for that sender.  They monitor all the major 
> RBLs (and a lot that you've never heard of), but they also consider what 
> the registered nameservers are for the sending domain, who the 
> registered owner of the network is in whois, and all those other things 
> that you might want to check.

I'm just running a couple of colo'd Linux boxes running F/OSS software,
for family, friends and several dozen commercial clients.  I'm a small
fish.  Every now and then I need to revisit mail filtering issues and
re-think what I'm doing and make sure it's compliant with the current
situation.  Nothing ever stays the same on the Internet.

> Do some research on the economics of spam, and how these guys get their 
> money.  It is an entire black economy, and they get paid based on their 
> deliverability, just like any other bulk mail service.

I either have to make decisions out front about rejecting spam based on
content, or I need to accept it and pass it on to users for them to
analyze and reject it, and if they set their filtering levels too high
and their SA Bayes data store isn't properly "well educated", they get
false positive hits and have to fish stuff out of their spam mail
folder.

I think the idea of picking a SA level of, say, 10 and rejecting
outright anything at or above this is probably a sound policy.  I'm not
doing this now, but using maildrop and SA it's pretty easy to do.

> If more people rejected spam outright during the SMTP dialog, we would 
> make a measurable impact on the spammer economy.  So long as there are 
> plenty of people who are happy to just throw it away after-the-fact, 
> then the spammers continue to win.

As always, your advice and concerns are well-considered, Brad.  I do
need to accept a certain amount of this stuff, consistent with the
requirement that 100% of legitimate email be delivered (and SA is far
from perfect), and because I'm a SOHO business, and a small one at that,
I can't afford dedicated analytical appliances and proprietary software
for this, most of which is outside my budget.  There's doubtless more I
can do.

It's a beautiful day, and I'm wasting it sitting indoors in front of a
computer.  I'm outa here!!!

-- 
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> >I stated in the original post that LO was also subbed.
>> 
>> 
>> Sorry. I missed that. I was more focussed on your multiple qrunners (my
>> diagnosis) issue, and then I skipped ahead.
>> 
>> Have you resolved the multiple qrunners?
>
>Yes, with work.  there multiples running (5)?  I don't know how or why, 
>but there were 5 full instantiations running.  Killed everything by hand 
>(mailmanctl stop was useless), and restarted it and everything *seems* OK 
>now.


mailmanctl stop should have stopped the last instance started, but yes,
it isn't going to stop everything in this situation.


>The files referenced were nowhere to be found, so picking them apart is a 
>non starter.  Looks like a race condition: Does mailman not check to see 
>if it's already running?


It does unless it is forced not to. The issue is that the check is via
lock files and init scripts tend to force override of the checks on
the theory that any lock files are residue from a prior boot.


>> >LO is getting 
>> >everything (requests, other list traffic, etc) *except* traffic from list 
>> >1.  But posts sent to list 1 show up in the archives of list 1:
>> >http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/01.html
>> >http://lists.ccm-l.org/pipermail/ccm-l/2008-December/02.html
>> 
>> 
>> Since the list is currently active, presumably others are receiving its
>> posts.
>
>Yep.
>
>> Is delivery enabled for the owner's subscribed address on list 1?
>Also mentioned in the first post: yes.


Actually, I don't see it in the first post at
.
In your second post at
,
I see

  I checked that I was still subbed and not being caught in a 
  discard file.

Perhaps "not being caught in a discard file" means to you that
Mailman's delivery is enabled, but it doesn't to me.

Actually, another possibility is that the owner-member of list one is
receiving digests.


>This was a really odd event.  I'm pretty surprised to find 5 copies 
>happily beating each other up without checking.  Could this be a build 
>issue (FreeBSD - I know there are reported "difficulties" here)< or does 
>MM not check?


Are you saying that fixing the multiple qrunner/Mailman instance issue
solved the missing mail problem? I'd be very surprised if that were
the case.

If the problem still exists, I think you need to check logs to find out
what's happening.

bin/list_members --regular --nomail=enabled ccm-l | wc -l

will tell you to how many recipients your test posts should be sent.

Also, you might do

bin/list_members --regular --nomail=enabled ccm-l | grep -i missing_adr

just to be sure.

Then check Mailman's smtp log for an entry like

Dec 20 08:39:58 2008 (30746)  smtp to ccm-l for nnn recips,
completed in t.ttt seconds

to see if nnn is the expected number. If it isn't (taking into account
that some member addresses in To: or Cc: might not be recipients
because of avoid dups), then we need to determine why. If it is, you
have to look at the MTA log to see what happened to the missing
recipient(s).

-- 
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San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Brad Knowles]

on 12/20/08 1:54 PM, Lindsay Haisley said:


Well I'm probably not doing as effective a job of pre-filtering as you
are at UT.


And what we're doing for python.org and ntp.org can't match those 
numbers, either.


For ntp.org, we do pretty much the same as you -- use a few RBLs 
up-front, and then SpamAssassin on the back-end.  What I want to do for 
the next version of the mail system there is to pull the RBLs into 
policyd-weight under postfix (so that we can apply SpamAssassin-like 
scoring into the RBL process), and not do any direct RBLs.  I'd also 
like to make sure that SpamAssassin is set up to run interactively.


For python.org, we're already running policyd-weight plus SpamBayes.  In 
the future, I'd like to see us pull SpamBayes into interactive mode.


For both sites, I want to look at pulling in reputation scoring systems 
like SenderBase, and get those incorporated into the process before 
handing off the remainder to the content-based scanning tools.



As always, your advice and concerns are well-considered, Brad.  I do
need to accept a certain amount of this stuff, consistent with the
requirement that 100% of legitimate email be delivered (and SA is far
from perfect), and because I'm a SOHO business, and a small one at that,
I can't afford dedicated analytical appliances and proprietary software
for this, most of which is outside my budget.  There's doubtless more I
can do.


You have a lot of options available to you, and you need to decide what 
you want to do and how you want to do it.  We can help you with that to 
a degree, but there are limits to what we can do.  And right now, 
Mailman doesn't have the best anti-spam features.  That is something we 
want to address, but we're not there yet.


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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 14:24 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
> I'd also 
> like to make sure that SpamAssassin is set up to run interactively.

What do you mean by this.  Can shell account users not interactively use
spamc or spamassassin from a command prompt?

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[J.A. Terranson]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> mailmanctl stop should have stopped the last instance started, but yes,
> it isn't going to stop everything in this situation.

Would a killall type of functionality be contraindicated in mailmanctl 
stop?

> >The files referenced were nowhere to be found, so picking them apart is a 
> >non starter.  Looks like a race condition: Does mailman not check to see 
> >if it's already running?
> 
> It does unless it is forced not to. The issue is that the check is via
> lock files and init scripts tend to force override of the checks on
> the theory that any lock files are residue from a prior boot.

We do not use -s on the init script.


> >> Is delivery enabled for the owner's subscribed address on list 1?
> >Also mentioned in the first post: yes.
> 
> Actually, I don't see it in the first post at
> .
> In your second post at
> ,
> I see

My mistake - you are correct, 2nd post.
 
>   I checked that I was still subbed and not being caught in a 
>   discard file.
> 
> Perhaps "not being caught in a discard file" means to you that
> Mailman's delivery is enabled, but it doesn't to me.

I guess the compund "checked that I was still subbed [implicitly == 
checked for nomail, etc]" and "not being caught in a discard file"
does equal delivery enabled when I had mentioned I was the only one not 
receiving posts [ie, delivery is globally enabled if Im the only one not 
getting them, and locally enabled as I am subbed and not blocked or 
discarded]".

Clearly, the amount of verbiage that caveat required illustrates the 
density of my assumption 
 
> > Actually, another possibility is that the owner-member of list one is
> receiving digests.

No.  Went there, looked at it.

> >This was a really odd event.  I'm pretty surprised to find 5 copies 
> >happily beating each other up without checking.  Could this be a build 
> >issue (FreeBSD - I know there are reported "difficulties" here)< or does 
> >MM not check?
> 
> 
> Are you saying that fixing the multiple qrunner/Mailman instance issue
> solved the missing mail problem? I'd be very surprised if that were
> the case.

Yes.  It appears to have completely resolved it.

> If the problem still exists, I think you need to check logs to find out
> what's happening.
> 
> bin/list_members --regular --nomail=enabled ccm-l | wc -l

this returned the correct # of subscribers +/-

> will tell you to how many recipients your test posts should be sent.
> 
> Also, you might do
> 
> bin/list_members --regular --nomail=enabled ccm-l | grep -i missing_adr

Returns a null

> just to be sure.
> 
> Then check Mailman's smtp log for an entry like
> 
> Dec 20 08:39:58 2008 (30746)  smtp to ccm-l for nnn recips,
> completed in t.ttt seconds



Dec 20 05:23:34 2008 (1368)  
smtp to ccm-l for 1 recips, completed in 0.611 seconds
Dec 20 06:35:59 2008 (1368) <49550272967245c1a49355a8953d0...@pandesk> 
smtp to med-jokes for 157 recips, completed in 23.833 seconds





smtp to med-events for 103 recips, completed in 14.170 seconds
Dec 20 12:11:05 2008 (5688)  smtp to 
med-jokes for 157 recips, completed in 11.838 seconds
Dec 20 12:11:28 2008 (5688) 
<68fd2c7c0812200550q32808396vf875b6ec66f9...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to 
med-jokes for 156 recips, completed in 22.845 seconds

157==correct, but one is unreachable right now due to cable cut.

Dec 20 12:11:30 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 1.341 seconds
Dec 20 12:11:31 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 1.532 seconds
Dec 20 12:11:33 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 1.618 seconds
Dec 20 12:12:03 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 0.603 seconds
Dec 20 12:12:04 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 0.551 seconds

< note that there are zero entries for CCM-L up to this point, despite 
archives to the contrary, and replies which show distribution to users 
[but not to poor old me :-(]  >

Dec 20 12:13:07 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to ccm-l for 668 
recips, completed in 45.689 seconds

668==correct

Dec 20 12:13:36 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to gasnet for 266 
recips, completed in 28.416 seconds

266==correct

Dec 20 12:13:56 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 158 
recips, completed in 19.564 seconds
Dec 20 12:14:07 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-events for 103 
recips, completed in 11.031 seconds
Dec 20 12:15:29 2008 (5688) 
 smtp to med-jokes for 1 
recips, completed in 0.446 seconds
Dec 20 12:21:38 2008 (5688)  
smtp to ccm-l for 1 recips, completed in 0.509 seconds
Dec 20 12:21:38 2008 (5688)  
smtp to ccm-l for 1 recips, completed in 0.463 seconds
Dec 20 12:21:40 2008 (5688)  
smtp to ccm-l for 1 recips, completed in 0.590 seconds
Dec 20 12:26:13 2008 (5688) <682dcaea23254a23b17ea3b309c6b...@gjrnx7400> 
smtp to med-events for 103 recips, completed in 8.432 second

Re: [Mailman-Users] Posts from listowner address issue

[Mark Sapiro]

J.A. Terranson wrote:
>
>On Sat, 20 Dec 2008, Mark Sapiro wrote:
>
>> mailmanctl stop should have stopped the last instance started, but yes,
>> it isn't going to stop everything in this situation.
>
>Would a killall type of functionality be contraindicated in mailmanctl 
>stop?


It would have to know what processes to kill. The masters (mailmanctl
processes) know which runners they started, but when you signal a
master with bin/mailmanctl whatever, the specific master that get's
signaled is the one who's PID is in the data/master-qrunner.pid file
in *this one's* var_prefix. It could detect in a possibly OS dependant
way that there are other masters running, but it can't know that they
aren't from other disjoint Mailman instances on the same server, so it
doesn't know if they should be SIGTERMd or not.

When a "duplicate" mailmanctl is started in a way that overrides the
locks (or the script removes the locks first - I've seen scripts like
that), it overwrites the data/master-qrunner.pid file and the first
PID is lost.

I suppose data/master-qrunner.pid could be converted to a stack of
PIDs, but that's just a way of recovering from a situation that
shouldn't occur in the first place.

Actually, I think there is an issue in that mailmanctl -s start is only
supposed to ignore the lock if it was created by a PID which is no
longer running, and I'm not sure that code is correct. I have to look
at it some more.


>> >The files referenced were nowhere to be found, so picking them apart is a 
>> >non starter.  Looks like a race condition: Does mailman not check to see 
>> >if it's already running?
>> 
>> It does unless it is forced not to. The issue is that the check is via
>> lock files and init scripts tend to force override of the checks on
>> the theory that any lock files are residue from a prior boot.
>
>We do not use -s on the init script.


How did 5 sets of mailmanctl and qrunners get started? Have you figured
out how that happened?


>> Are you saying that fixing the multiple qrunner/Mailman instance issue
>> solved the missing mail problem? I'd be very surprised if that were
>> the case.
>
>Yes.  It appears to have completely resolved it.


Well, as I said I'm surprised.  I'm glad it is resolved, but I'm at a
loss to explain why having multiple runners serving the same queue
entries would cause non-delivery of a post to a subset of the list
members. Apparently it either did or there was some other issue that
was fixed by stopping everything and restarting.


>> Also, you might do
>> 
>> bin/list_members --regular --nomail=enabled ccm-l | grep -i missing_adr
>
>Returns a null


Perhaps you misunderstood. 'missing_adr' was supposed to be the address
(yours) that wasn't being delivered. If it was that in the above, that
means the address is not a regular member with delivery enabled so it
shouldn't be receiving posts.


>> just to be sure.
>> 
>> Then check Mailman's smtp log for an entry like
>> 
>> Dec 20 08:39:58 2008 (30746)  smtp to ccm-l for nnn recips,
>> completed in t.ttt seconds
>
>
>
>Dec 20 05:23:34 2008 (1368)  
>smtp to ccm-l for 1 recips, completed in 0.611 seconds


This is a Mailman generated notification of some kind.


>Dec 20 06:35:59 2008 (1368) <49550272967245c1a49355a8953d0...@pandesk> 
>smtp to med-jokes for 157 recips, completed in 23.833 seconds
>
>
>
>mailman>
>
>smtp to med-events for 103 recips, completed in 14.170 seconds
>Dec 20 12:11:05 2008 (5688)  smtp to 
>med-jokes for 157 recips, completed in 11.838 seconds
>Dec 20 12:11:28 2008 (5688) 
><68fd2c7c0812200550q32808396vf875b6ec66f9...@mail.gmail.com> smtp to 
>med-jokes for 156 recips, completed in 22.845 seconds
>
>157==correct, but one is unreachable right now due to cable cut.


More likely, the  post was sent by
Mailman to all 157 members and the
<68fd2c7c0812200550q32808396vf875b6ec66f9...@mail.gmail.com> post was
a reply that had the OP in To: or Cc: so Mailman didn't send to that
address and only sent to the other 156.

The unreachable address should be delivered by Mailman to the MTA and
only detected by the MTA when it attempts delivery. If the MTA is
actually checking whether the address is deliverable during Mailman's
SMTP to the MTA, Mailman's performance will suffer greatly. Plus,
there would be something for this address in Mailman's smtp-failure
log.


>Dec 20 12:11:30 2008 (5688) 
> smtp to med-jokes for 1 
>recips, completed in 1.341 seconds
>Dec 20 12:11:31 2008 (5688) 
> smtp to med-jokes for 1 
>recips, completed in 1.532 seconds
>Dec 20 12:11:33 2008 (5688) 
> smtp to med-jokes for 1 
>recips, completed in 1.618 seconds
>Dec 20 12:12:03 2008 (5688) 
> smtp to med-jokes for 1 
>recips, completed in 0.603 seconds
>Dec 20 12:12:04 2008 (5688) 
> smtp to med-jokes for 1 
>recips, completed in 0.551 seconds


These 5 are all Mailman notices.


>< note that there are zero entries for CCM-L up to this point, despite 
>archives to the contrary, and replies which show distribution to users 
>[but not to poor 

[Mailman-Users] Upgrading rpm mailman from mailman source

[Paul]

I tried yesterday unsuccessfully from upgrade mailman-2.1.5.1-34.rhel4.6
on Centos 4 to the latest 2.1.11 from sourceforge.

When I ran "configure" it said I needed to install Python from source or
install the Python-devel package, so I installed the python-devel.

# yum -y install python-devel

Then "configure" said my mailman package path was not in
"/usr/local/mailman", which it is not, it is in "/usr/lib/mailman".

So, within the unpackaged mailman 2.1.11 dir, I did a global replace to
put my path in there:

# perl -pi -e 's/usr\/local\/mailman/usr\/lib\/mailman/g' `find ./ -type f`

Then "configure" ran successfully, then ran "make", then "make install". 
All seemed to go well.  I did "check_perms" and fixed permissions. started
up mailman "service mailman start", and all seemed to be running fine, but
now none of my lists showed "lists_lists".  My "mm_cfg.py" was untouched. 
Being in a hurry because I didn't alert any of the lists members of
downtime, I freaked out and restored my system.  Luckily I just did a full
backup of my LVM, so booted up via live CD and restored the LVM from the
dump file and was back online.

Is there anything special to do when updating from source?  I've usually
done it from RPM packages.  Any pointers?  Thanks.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Brad Knowles]

on 12/20/08 2:35 PM, Lindsay Haisley said:


What do you mean by this.  Can shell account users not interactively use
spamc or spamassassin from a command prompt?


By interactive, I mean that SpamAssassin (or SpamBayes) would be 
executed before we give the sender a "250 Ok" for the message.  That 
would allow us to reject stuff that gets a high spam score instead of 
dropping it.


We don't have any shell users on either of these domains.  Well, at 
least we don't have any that get their mail on these systems, all mail 
is forwarded elsewhere and we don't provide any POP3 or IMAP services.


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Re: [Mailman-Users] Upgrading rpm mailman from mailman source

[Mark Sapiro]

Paul wrote:

>I tried yesterday unsuccessfully from upgrade mailman-2.1.5.1-34.rhel4.6
>on Centos 4 to the latest 2.1.11 from sourceforge.
>
>When I ran "configure" it said I needed to install Python from source or
>install the Python-devel package, so I installed the python-devel.
>
># yum -y install python-devel


Good.


>Then "configure" said my mailman package path was not in
>"/usr/local/mailman", which it is not, it is in "/usr/lib/mailman".
>
>So, within the unpackaged mailman 2.1.11 dir, I did a global replace to
>put my path in there:
>
># perl -pi -e 's/usr\/local\/mailman/usr\/lib\/mailman/g' `find ./ -type f`


This is probably insufficient and definitely wrong. First, if ALL of
your existing Mailman is in /usr/lib/mailman, you should be able to
successfully configure with

./configure --prefix=/usr/lib/mailman (plus your other configure
options like

  --with-mail-gid  group name mail programs run as
  --with-cgi-gid   group name CGI programs run as
  --with-mailhost  specify the hostname part for outgoing email
  --with-urlhost   specify the hostname part of urls
)


>Then "configure" ran successfully, then ran "make", then "make install". 
>All seemed to go well.  I did "check_perms" and fixed permissions. started
>up mailman "service mailman start", and all seemed to be running fine, but
>now none of my lists showed "lists_lists".  My "mm_cfg.py" was untouched. 
>Being in a hurry because I didn't alert any of the lists members of
>downtime, I freaked out and restored my system.  Luckily I just did a full
>backup of my LVM, so booted up via live CD and restored the LVM from the
>dump file and was back online.
>
>Is there anything special to do when updating from source?  I've usually
>done it from RPM packages.  Any pointers?  Thanks.


The most likely explanation is your existing installation is RedHats
FHS compliant Mailman, and various parts of it are all over the place.
See
.

If this is the case, you could try to apply the patch attached to that
post before running configure, but it may not apply to 2.1.11 since
it's against a 2.1.5 base. I wouldn't recommend that approach.

Assuming you are not running SELinux, I suggest you start over with a
fresh unpack of the 2.1.11 tarball and configure with the options

--prefix=/usr/lib/mailman
--with-var-prefix=/var/lib/mailman

in addition to any others you might need.  Then allow some time for the
next steps.

Stop Mailman

Create /var/lib/mailman/data/ and /var/lib/mailman/qfiles/ if necessary.
Move /etc/mailman/* to /var/lib/mailman/data/
Stop the MTA

If you are using Postfix and automatic alias generation for Postfix,
update alias_maps and if applicable, virtual_alias_maps in Postfix's
main.cf to point to the new locations in /var/lib/mailman/data/.

Move /var/spool/mailman/* to /var/lib/mailman/qfiles/
make install
Start the MTA
Start Mailman

If you are running SELinux, you will either have to stick with the
current locations for everything and use RedHat's patch or revise your
security policies.

-- 
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San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Spam to list-owner

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Sat, 2008-12-20 at 17:55 -0600, Brad Knowles wrote:
> By interactive, I mean that SpamAssassin (or SpamBayes) would be 
> executed before we give the sender a "250 Ok" for the message.  That 
> would allow us to reject stuff that gets a high spam score instead of 
> dropping it.

Oh, Ok.  Thanks.  I just didn't understand the terminology.

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[Mailman-Users] bounced addresses stays there

[faisal anif]

hi,
 
I have the following settings: 
 
bounce_score_threshold: 2.0
bounce_info_stale_after: 7
bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings: 0 - for immediate removal
bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings_interval: 7
 
then I notice that the addresses that have delivery disabled for bounce reason 
is still in the members list and not completely removed from the list .. which 
is not good becasue I want them totally removed and know the exact number of 
active members .. 
 
how can I do that?
 
thanks..
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Re: [Mailman-Users] bounced addresses stays there

[Mark Sapiro]

faisal anif wrote:
> 
>I have the following settings: 
> 
>bounce_score_threshold: 2.0
>bounce_info_stale_after: 7
>bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings: 0 - for immediate removal
>bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings_interval: 7
> 
>then I notice that the addresses that have delivery disabled for bounce reason 
>is still in the members list and not completely removed from the list .. which 
>is not good becasue I want them totally removed and know the exact number of 
>active members .. 
> 
>how can I do that?


The settings you have will do that. If you recently reduced
bounce_you_are_disabled_warnings to 0 from some other number, those
members whose delivery was disabled by bounce at the time of the
reduction will still get the number of warnings they were set to get
when their delivery was disabled before they are removed. Also,
cron/disabled has to be run in order to send the warnings and
ultimately remove the members.

If you don't want to wait for these to be automatically removed, you
can always remove them via the admin interface or if you have command
line access, do

bin/list_members -n bybounce LISTNAME | bin/remove_members -f - LISTNAME

which will remove all members with delivery disabled by bounce.

In any case any members who in the future bounce on two out of seven
days will be immediately removed.

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