[Mailman-Users] Check_perms reports invalid syntax?

[Bill Christensen]

Hi all,

I'm setting up a new server with Mailman.

After installing I tried
bin/check_perms -f
and got:
file "bin/check_perms", line 44
'''
   ^
Syntax error: invalid syntax

I'm running Python 2.5.1.   My existing server, running Mailman 
2.1.11/Python 2.3, has the same line and no problems with it.


Any ideas?   Do I need to upgrade or patch Python, and if so which 
2.5 or better version works with Mailman?


thanks

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Unable to receive Zimbra-generated mailforwarded by Mailman

[Mark Sapiro]

Brad Knowles wrote:

>on 4/3/09 1:50 PM, Pete Smith said:
>
>> 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).


As Brad suggests, you are welcome to send the messages to me, and I
will try to help.

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

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Re: [Mailman-Users] New to the List Serve - responding to posts issue

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Brad Knowles writes:

 > There are ways to force all replies to go back to the mailing list, yes. 

To expand a bit on what Brad said, there is a general, standard way to
set the address(es) that will be used for a basic reply.  I forget
where in the Mailman interface it is (I wouldn't touch it with a
ten-foot barge pole) but "Reply-To" is the keyword you're looking for.

Before you go searching for it, though, consider that 

(1) The intent of the Reply-To standard is to provide *authors*, not
mailing lists, with a way to specify *where the author* should be
contacted (on a paper document with multiple authors, this is
often identified as the "correspondence address").  As such,
almost all mail clients treat it as Word from On High.

In particular, with many mail clients users are forced to type in
any other address (or get it from their contact list), making
private replies extremely inconvenient.  But typically private
replies are more urgent and more sensitive.  A message that was
intended to be public that goes only to the author is a safer
failure mode than a private message inadvertently published.

In your case, at first glance it sounds like it's pretty safe.
The community members are moderated, so intemperate replies from
the peanut gallery can be held and you can ask the person if they
really wanted to send that.  But think about the failure mode: the
board members are *unmoderated*.  A sharp reply, or an inside
joke, by one of them *will be automatically passed through*, and
could easily damage the board's reputation severely (unless
they're all angels...).

I've also seen it used as an excuse for posting things that
shouldn't have been written in the first place.  "I'm really sorry
if somebody's feelings were hurt, but it's not my fault!  I didn't
realize that it was going to go to the whole list"

(2) There is a standard, which Mailman participates in, called
"List-Post".  A reasonably good mail client will generally offer a
Reply-to-List command that prefers that address to the author for
ordinary replies, but falls back to the author otherwise.  If your
community members use such a client, they'll generally get the
best of both worlds: a flexible client with convenient ways to
reply to author, to list, or to all, with a single command that
works almost all the time.

Unfortunately I don't know of any for Windows or the Mac offhand
(I use Unix-style clients on Linux or the Mac), but you might try
getting people to look at the help for their mail clients.  It
pays off in the long run with a more smoothly running list.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Unable to receive Zimbra-generated mail forwarded by Mailman

[Brad Knowles]

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).


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Re: [Mailman-Users] New to the List Serve - responding to posts issue

[Brad Knowles]

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.


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Re: [Mailman-Users] [-0.5] Re: Soft bounces....

[Brad Knowles]

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.


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Re: [Mailman-Users] Soft bounces....

[Brad Knowles]

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.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Moderator and Admin emails not being sent...

[Todd Giles]

>
> It appears that the problem is that your alias for sandia-owner is
>
> sandia-owner:  "|/home/gileszone/mailman/mail/mailman post sandia"
>
> instead of
>
> sandia-owner:  "|/home/gileszone/mailman/mail/mailman owner sandia"
>
>
> Thus mailman sends the notice to sandia-owner and instead of being
> received as a message to -owner, it is received as a post and
> discarded as being a post from a non-member.
>
> You would probably do well to check all your aliases.


Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.  Finally tracked down my
issue.  My aliases were set up properly, problem was I had a custom rewrite
rule in sendmail going on to forward all emails in the form
user-anytexth...@domain.com to be directed to the address u...@domain.com.
 Thus, the emails sent to sandia-ow...@domain.com were being forwarded
instead to san...@domain.com.

I've re-written my rules to only forward emails from actual users on my
domain in that form, and to not do any rewriting of the email address for
other emails.

Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction of thought!

-Todd
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[Mailman-Users] New to the List Serve - responding to posts issue

[Robert McGuire]

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.
 
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.
 
Thanks,

Robert McGuire
Buford, GA 30518


  
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[Mailman-Users] Unable to receive Zimbra-generated mail forwarded by Mailman

[Pete Smith]

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.


The same e-mail, sent by the same sender from the same client, when 
sent directly to me (not via Mailman), comes through fine).


This happens on at least two different Mailman installations, one at 
contesting.com, the other at mailman.qth.net.


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.


Thanks in advance,

Pete Smith 


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Re: [Mailman-Users] Can't change host name preference

[Mike Flaherty]

Thanks for the detailed reply.
 
That fixed everything!!
 
- Mike

--- On Fri, 4/3/09, Mark Sapiro  wrote:

From: Mark Sapiro 
Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Can't change host name preference
To: mflahe...@tidewise.com, mailman-users@python.org
Date: Friday, April 3, 2009, 10:46 AM

Mike Flaherty wrote:
> 
>I am trying to set up Mailman on a new domain.  I have done it in the past
without issue, but now I have a really bizzare problem.
> 
>When I go to the "MYLIST mailing list administration General Options
Section" page, I notice the following entry preloaded in the "Host
name this list prefers for email" field...
> 
>syd.xobas.net
> 
>I have NO IDEA where this is coming from.  It is not my domain, so I
replace it with my own.


It comes from the add_virtualhost() entry for the domain. There should
be an

add_virtualhost('web_domain', 'email_domain')

line in mm_cfg.py. Then if you create the list from the web interface
with a URL whose host name is 'web_domain', the list will be created
with host_name = 'email_domain'.

Likewise if you create the list with bin/newlist -u 'web_domain'


>However, when I click the "Submit your changes" button, it goes
to an invalid page.


You mean a 404? If so, the list's web_page_url is also messed up.


When I try again, I notice that when I hover over the button, the URL
that it translates to incorporates that "syd.xobas.net" domain into
the URL.


Huh? The button is a submit action for a form. Are you saying the POST
action URL has host "syd.xobas.net"? If so, my best guess is that
that
is the value of DEFAULT_URL_HOST and DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST in your
installation.


>I looked all over my server (a vps running CentOS 5) for where that entry
might be coming from.  I did find an occurance of it in 
> 
>/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/MYLIST/index.html
> 
>and
> 
>/var/lib/mailman/archives/private/mailman/index.html
> 
>But I don't know how it got there.  Where is the proper place to
replace that domain with my own?


In mm_cfg.py

DEFAULT_URL_HOST = 'your_web_domain'
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'your_email_domain'
VIRTUAL_HOSTS.clear()
add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST)

plus add_virtualhost() lines for any additional domains.

Then run fix_url to fix the existing list, e.g.

  bin/withlist -l -a -r fix_url 

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

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Re: [Mailman-Users] [-0.5] Re: Soft bounces....

[Charles Gregory]

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Mark Sapiro wrote:

If you're getting "bounces" like "message undeliverable after 4 hours;
will keep trying until message is 5 days old" Mailman should be
ignoring those.


I apologize for not thinking through the fact that a 4xx would have to 
continue for 4 hours before mailman ever heard about it, but now you are 
saying that notice is ignored. So, I seem to have misunderstood the docs.
I thought '4xx' errors (when they get back to mailman) were 'soft', so 
if 'message undeliverable for 4 hours' doesn't count, then what 
messages does mailman treat as a 'soft' bounce and only score 0.5?



If it isn't, send me a complete, raw copy of the DSN,
and I'll fix it and tell you how to fix yours.


I'm not working on DSN's, I'm fighting with yahoo over large numbers of 
stupid, needless 4xx delays in my mail logs (and log reports). There 
aren't very many things in their generic 'explanations' that seem to 
apply. So I'm trying to cut down on our system attempting to send mail to 
5xx recipients at Yahoo.


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?


- Charles
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Soft bounces....

[Charles Gregory]

On Fri, 3 Apr 2009, Brad Knowles wrote:

 Yahoo expects me to respond promptly to 5xx bounces, disabling any
 subscriptions, otherwise it starts generating 'greylist' 4xx bounces for
 my mail. Unfortunately, if I try to lower the bounce threshold, the
 now-daily occurence of 4xx bounces guarantees that all yahoo addresses
 will end up disabled. Is there any way, short of fiddling with and
 recompiling from source, to separate 'hard' bounce handling from 'soft'
 bounce handling, or to change the 'scores' that each accumulates?
Thing is, Mailman doesn't see the 5xx or 4xx codes directly.  It hands 
the messages off to your MTA, and your MTA sees those codes.


Good point. Even though I'm seeing 'deferals' in the MTA logs, they 
don't go long enough to generate '4 hour warnings' that mailman 
would have to handle as a 'soft bounce'. Just verified this in the logs

(where I should have looked first! LOL). Excellent! Thanks!

Since we do not, and we cannot, have direct access to the 5xx versus 4xx 
response codes from Yahoo!, I don't think it makes a lot of sense to try 
to modify the code to treat a bounce resulting from a permanent 5xx 
response code any different from a "delayed message" notice resulting 
from a temporary 4xx response code.


(nod) No, all I need to do now is lower the threshold so Yahoo won't see 
so many attempts to send mail to 5xx addresses Then maybe they'll stop 
doing so many 4xx delays of my mail (not just a mailman problem, 
incidentally).


Set up your MTA to handle Yahoo! separately from other sites, so that 
any slow downs there don't slow you down in getting to other domains, 
and vice-versa.


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...
Though I find it ironic that Yahoo sends lots of mail to me for unknown 
users :)


Thanks again!

- Charles

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