Re: [Mailman-Users] Automated Subscription Bots Inundating ListOwners With Subscription Requests

[Ivan Fetch]

On Nov 24, 2012, at 4:11 PM, Mark Sapiro  wrote:

> Mark Sapiro wrote at
> :
> 
>> I have implemented a simple version of what I think you requested in
>> your post at
>> .
>> 
>> It is implemented by the attached patch against Mailman 2.1.15.
> 
> 
> I have augmented that patch with a timestamp and it now also checks that
> the hash is no older than mm_cfg.FORM_LIFETIME. See
>  and
> 
> for a bug report and the patch which will be released with Mailman 2.1.16.



I would like to apply this same patch to a 2.1.14 installation.

I downloaded the three modified files from this patch, and diffed them against 
2.1.14 files. It looks like this patch will mostly apply to 2.1.14, but I'm not 
sure about the differences relating to comparing passwords, and the use of 
"strip." See 128,129c146,147 in the patch below for the what I am asking about.


Here is my diff:


1c1
< # Copyright (C) 1998-2009 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
---
> # Copyright (C) 1998-2012 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
22a23
> import time
112c113
< email = cgidata.getvalue('email', '')
---
> email = cgidata.getvalue('email', '').strip()
122a124,140
> # Are we checking the hidden data?
> if mm_cfg.SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET:
> now = int(time.time())
> try:
> ftime, fhash = cgidata.getvalue('sub_form_token', '').split(':')
> then = int(ftime)
> except ValueError:
> ftime = fhash = ''
> then = now
> token = Utils.sha_new(mm_cfg.SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET +
>   ftime +
>   mlist.internal_name() +
>   remote).hexdigest()
> if now - then > mm_cfg.FORM_LIFETIME:
> results.append(_('The form is too old.  Please GET it again.'))
> if token != fhash:
> results.append(_('You must GET the form before submitting it.'))
128,129c146,147
< password = cgidata.getvalue('pw')
< confirmed = cgidata.getvalue('pw-conf')
---
> password = cgidata.getvalue('pw', '').strip()
> confirmed = cgidata.getvalue('pw-conf', '').strip()
131c149
< if password is None and confirmed is None:
---
> if not password and not confirmed:
133c151
< elif password is None or confirmed is None:
---
> elif not password or not confirmed:

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Memory usage climbs for 3rd and 4th outgoingqrunner process

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Mark,

On Aug 22, 2011, at 7:42 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Ivan Fetch wrote:
>> 
>> I am curious what would cause an outgoing queue runner process to increase 
>> in memory usage, when Mailman is idle?
> 
> 
> [...]
>> 
>> Even when Mailman is idle and not processing messages, the memory usage for 
>> the fourth outgoing runner process remains at 200Mb and continues to rise.
>> 
>> Last week, after running this way for 3 days, this 4th process was using 800 
>> Mb of memory - at the time, Mailman runners were restarted (although Mailman 
>> was idle, and would handle messages quickly). WE may be at that point again 
>> tomorrow - I'd like to gather what info I can about this process before it 
>> runs away.
> 
> 
> I can almost guarantee it won't run away. Eventually it will reach a
> point where every list object is cached and a maximum sized message
> has been handled, and it will stop growing. Eventually, all 4
> OutgoingRunners will reach this size (unless this size is due to
> processing an anomalously large message, but that doesn't appear to be
> the case here as large messages also affect IncomingRunner).
> 
> There are threads on this in the archives. Some relevant ones are at
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2007-December/059332.html>,
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2008-July/062359.html>
> and
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2010-March/069075.html>.
> 
> In particular, see the post at
> <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2010-March/069078.html>
> which includes a patch to disable list caching in the qrunners if you
> want to try that, but I suggest you first just wait, and I predict the
> memory growth will slow and eventually stop and it won't impact
> performance because at any given time most of the memory is inactive
> and will be swapped out if needed for other processes.
> 

I've let things run, and although there is still some growth, the box has not 
hit 97% (of 2Gb) memory usage like it did once before. 

# ps -Umailman -o pmem -o size -o args |sort -n
%MEMSZ COMMAND
 0.2  7388 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/mailmanctl start
 0.4  7408 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=NewsRunner:0:1 -s
 0.8 12740 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=ArchRunner:0:1 -s
 1.3 23032 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=CommandRunner:0:1 -s
 1.3 24872 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=RetryRunner:0:1 -s
 2.4 48280 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=IncomingRunner:0:1 -s
 2.6 50060 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:0:4 -s
 3.4 67028 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:1:4 -s
 3.6 70140 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=BounceRunner:0:1 -s
 3.8 84208 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=VirginRunner:0:1 -s
 6.6 133052 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:2:4 -s
10.1 205020 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:3:4 -s


You mentioned large messages causing similar behavior, but also impacting the 
incomingrunner. How would I tell whether that is the case?


> Also, you can add up all the sizes of the lists/*/config.pck files to
> get a very rough idea of how much things may grow.

This came out to 32Mb, for 1360 lists.


Thanks,

Ivan.























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[Mailman-Users] Memory usage climbs for 3rd and 4th outgoing qrunner process

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

I am curious what would cause an outgoing queue runner process to increase in 
memory usage, when Mailman is idle?

I am running 4 outgoing qrunner slices, using this in mm_cfg.py:

try:
   QRUNNERS.remove(('OutgoingRunner', 1))
   QRUNNERS.append(('OutgoingRunner', 4))
except ValueError:
   pass


I've noticed that the first two processes use 20 MB of memory, the third has 
climbed to 29MB, and the fourth has climbed to 200Mb - over the past two days.

Even when Mailman is idle and not processing messages, the memory usage for the 
fourth outgoing runner process remains at 200Mb and continues to rise.

Last week, after running this way for 3 days, this 4th process was using 800 Mb 
of memory - at the time, Mailman runners were restarted (although Mailman was 
idle, and would handle messages quickly). WE may be at that point again 
tomorrow - I'd like to gather what info I can about this process before it runs 
away.


Here is what these look like right now:

# ps -ax -o pmem -o size -o args |sort -n |tail
Warning: bad syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See /usr/share/doc/procps-3.2.8/FAQ
 0.9 184936 /usr/sbin/named -u named
 1.2 20712 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=BounceRunner:0:1 -s
 1.3 23032 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=CommandRunner:0:1 -s
 1.3 25164 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=RetryRunner:0:1 -s
 1.4 25400 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:1:4 -s
 1.7 31936 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=VirginRunner:0:1 -s
 2.1 41292 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:2:4 -s
 2.2 42612 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=IncomingRunner:0:1 -s
 2.9 55456 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:0:4 -s
10.1 205020 /usr/bin/python /mail/mailman/mailman/bin/qrunner 
--runner=OutgoingRunner:3:4 -


Thanks,

Ivan.























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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Brad,

On Aug 15, 2011, at 1:49 AM, Brad Knowles wrote:

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.


OK - now we're on the same page. :) The MTA which Mailman relays to, does not 
repeat processes like virus / spam scanning. We are re-working our gateways and 
relays over the next few months, to further separate out these roles. E.G. 
Quarantine of spam will be handled before a message hits Mailman, not after the 
message has been exploded to list subscribers.



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.

We are definitely moving to this (MTA will accept what ever Mailman gives it). 
For the next few months, we will have some local accounts tempfailing, until we 
get off of Sun IMS or JSMS or what ever the product is named today. Part of why 
the relayis tempfailing, is because we hapen to be using a relay which is also 
a mailstore.



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.

AH, good to know RE: Mailman queueing. SO, the only reason why things should be 
in qfiles/retry, woudl be something like a relay being unavailable.


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.

WHen you say "local MTA" you don't mean strictly local to the Mailman box 
right? I believe you mean local as in a separate relay box.


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<http://python.org> where all 
the
official Mailman mailing lists are hosted -- using Mailman.


Thanks Brad, for your time on this, and your later analogy RE: input and output.

- Ivan























.
-

[Mailman-Users] Are Mailman's files sparse?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

As part of copying our Mailman data from one box to another, I wanted to 
verify: are any of Mailman's data files, sparse, E.G> the .pck files and other 
files in the data directory?

It looks to me like the answer to this is no.

Thanks,

Ivan.
























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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Brad,

On Aug 14, 2011, at 8:44 PM, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 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.
> 

> 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.
> 
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.

> 
> 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.


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.

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).


Thanks,

Ivan.























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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:15 PM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> No. Threaded delivery in SMTPDirect.py was an experimental feature in
> Mailman 2.0. It was never implemented for Mailman 2.1 although the
> setting and its documentation were not removed from Defaults.py. Setting
> this in mm_cfg.py has no effect. Any difference would be due to random
> variation or other factors.
> 
> What I meant was to put something like
> 
> try:
>QRUNNERS.remove(('OutgoingRunner', 1))
>QRUNNERS.append(('OutgoingRunner', 2))
> except ValueError:
>pass
> 
> in mm_cfg.py and restart Mailman. The above will cause Mailman to start
> two copies of OutgoingRunner with each processing half of the hashed
> queue space. See the
> 
> #
> # Qrunner defaults
> #
> 
> section in Defaults.py for more info.
> 


Ok, I did this, and verified that more outgoing processes were started (in the 
qrunnenr log, and with ps). Testing 5000 messages to a list with 25 recipients 
took:
8 & 1/2 minutes with 1 outgoing slice
5 & 1/2 minutes with 2 slices
exactly 5 minutes with 4 slices.

I noticed that the incoming qrunner was using 10% CPU (according to the pcpu 
column of ps) even after qfiles/in was empty, and after all 5000 messages were 
processed. I wonder what the incoming runner is doing - any ideas there?


> Just FYI, bounce processing never sees the retries until such time as
> Mailman's retry processing gives up on the delivery (default after 5 days).

OK, this just means that a message which is tempfailing will have to get 
retried for 5 days, before normal bounce processing rules can (potentially) act 
on it. I suspect a lot of these addresses are our own accounts which are 
tempfailing because they are disabled, in some sort of transition, or have 
broken LDAP records - I will look at smtp-failure some more.

Thanks,

Ivan.























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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

THanks Mark, I appreciate this. MOre below:

On Aug 14, 2011, at 11:39 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:
> 
> It seems the major hurdle is in processing the 'out' queue. It is
> possible to slice OutgoingRunner to provide some parallelism in this
> process and that may speed things up, but I suspect that a lot of the
> time is in network communications between OutgoingRunner and the
> remote Postfix and that slicing OutgoingRunner may not help much, but
> it would be worth rerunning your benchmark with 2 or 4 outgoing runner
> slices to see if it helps.
> 
BY slicing, do you mean setting MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS in mm_cfg.py (restarting 
Mailman of course)? I did this, with values of 2 and 4, and if it made a 
difference for my smaller benchmark of 5000 messages, to one list of 25 
recipients, it was only seconds of improvement.


> There are some MTA tuning tips in the FAQ
> , but some are only applicable to Mailman
> 2.0 so be careful.
> 
The only thing I can think of which may help, given that Mailman's Postfix is 
not delivering to subscribers, is to adjust concurrency or backoff settings for 
the local delivery agent, which is piping messages into Mailman's post script. 
I'm not sure whether Postfix still uses the backoff algorythm, when using local 
and pipe though.


> 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.


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.


Thanks,

Ivan.























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[Mailman-Users] Mailman throughput

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

I am trying to gage the capability of a Mailman virtual machine, which we will 
be moving our lists to. I'd like to do my best to size and tune this VM, and 
it's Postfix and Mailman installation, before putting it in production, and 
potentially having to troubleshoot and tune in a hurry.

What is a reasonable / realistic way to benchmark a Mailman installation? Are 
there details of other similarly sized instlalations and throughput numbers 
which I can compare?

We have 1300 mailing lists, and average 68000 posts to lists per day. We have 
lists as large as 7000 subscribers, but I'd say that the average size of a list 
is 500 subscribers (this number is a rough guess, based on some crunching of 
Mailman logs).

THe new VM will receive messages for mailing lists using Postfix. Mailman hands 
off to a separate box to deliver to list recipients. So Postfix on the Mailman 
VM will not be busy trying to deliver to subscribers.

I am sending some test messages through the VM, but don't know whether this is 
useful or pointless, in telling me how capable the VM is.

The VM processed 1 messages in an hour and 10 minutes. The messages went to 
two lists, one with 25 recipients and the other with 500 recipients. The VM 
(Linux) peaked at a load average of 4 (2 VCPUs), and was using 800Mb of it's 2G 
ERAM for IO caching. I could add more resources, but it doesn't look like they 
would get used.

Initially (maybe for the first 15-20 minutes) the Postfix queue had to catch up 
submitting messages to Mailman. After that, qfiles/in was empty, and the work 
which remained was to process qfiles/out and SMTP the outbound messages to the 
relay. I raised SMTP_MAX_RCPTS from 500 to 1000, but this did not seem to make 
a difference.

SO I may be able to tune Postfix handing off to Mailman, as well as Mailman 
handing off to the SMTP relay. Any suggestoins here?


The current Mailman box runs SOlaris / Sparc. The Mailman processes use 1.2G of 
memory, and CPU (this is a Sunfire 880, 4 Ultrasparc III procs) hovers around 
5%.


Thanks,

Ivan.























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Re: [Mailman-Users] upgrading list and other data from 2.1.9 to2.1.14

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, Mark Sapiro wrote:


That is correct, but there may be timing issues. Are you changing DNS
or physically reassigning the IP address to the new box.

If you're changing DNS, I'd start now and give all the relevant DNS
entries a 5 minute or less TTL, so you don't have to worry about old
DNS for more than 5 minutes.


Thanks for thinking about / covering all of these aspects. The IP will 
move to the new box.




If you're not going to sync qfiles, you need to make sure that all
queues are empty on the old box. Maybe wait for a quiet moment when
queues are empty and stop the MTA.


   I was planning to sync qfiles also (now that you mention it). Looking 
at our current qfiles, some of them have files which look like they should 
be deleted:


Bounces: 260 (all .bak, but one .tmp)
Shunt: 145 .pck

   Should I kill the files in bounces, and run unshunt on files in shunt 
which are not terribly old?



Thanks for your time,

Ivan.


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Re: [Mailman-Users] upgrading list and other data from 2.1.9 to 2.1.14

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello, thanks for your reply,


On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, Mark Sapiro wrote:


Ivan Fetch wrote:


Is it possible to copy list and archives data from a 2.1.9 Mailman 
installation, to a 2.1.14 installation, and run bin/update to update data from 
2.1.9 to 2.1.14? I assume bin/update will make any necessary changes to data 
structures, from 2.1.9 to 2.1.14?




Yes and no. If you just copy a lists/LISTNAME/config.pck from any 2.1.x
or even (I think) from 2.0.x to a more recent installation, the first
time the list is instantiated, mailman will automatically do any
required updates.

bin/update is designed for migrating an entire installation, not
individual lists, and it normally won't do anything if run by hand in
an existing installation. It does migration tasks other than updating
the actual list config.

For the archives, the recommended process is to first check and if
necessary fix the archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox files
with bin/cleanarch and then move those mbox files only and build
archives on the new host with bin/arch --wipe.

It is possible to just move the archives/private/LISTNAME tree rather
than running bin/arch --wipe as long as permissions are OK or fixed
after the move, but you still need to move
archives/private/LISTNAME.mbox/LISTNAME.mbox.

You don't need to do anything with archives/public/LISTNAME as those
symlinks will be created for lists with public archives when the list
is first accessed.

See the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/2oA9>.

Also, if your MTA uses aliases, you may need to run bin/genaliases
after the move and/or manually update aliases.



   Thank you - this helps me walk through the process.

   The goal is to move all lists, archives, and data to the new box, and 
then install Mailman 2.1.14 over those directories - I have done this.


   When this box goes production, I want to refresh the lists, archives, 
and data from the current 2.1.9 Mailman. All paths and host names will 
stay the same.


   It sounds like there isn't anything I have to do after syncing the 
lists, data, and archives directories.


   IF a list's pck file is updated when the list is next instantiated - 
what is the simplest thing that will trigger this? Iterating through all 
lists somehow? (I realize this isn't strictly necessary to do because it 
will happen on the fly)


Thanks,

Ivan.

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[Mailman-Users] upgrading list and other data from 2.1.9 to 2.1.14

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

Is it possible to copy list and archives data from a 2.1.9 Mailman 
installation, to a 2.1.14 installation, and run bin/update to update data from 
2.1.9 to 2.1.14? I assume bin/update will make any necessary changes to data 
structures, from 2.1.9 to 2.1.14?

Here is why I am doing this:

I took a Mailman 2.1.9 installation from Solaris (everything Mailman is under a 
single prefix directory) and copied it to A Linux system. I ran make install 
from Mailman 2.1.14 source, which did `make upgrade' as part of the 
installation. After some testing, I would like to copy current list and archive 
data to the Mailman 2.1.14 (Linux) system, at which time that system will 
become production.


Thanks,

Ivan.























.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Moving / upgrading Mailman from Solaris to Linux

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

Thank you, Mark, Adam, and Andrew for your replies. More below.



> -Original Message-
> From: Mark Sapiro [mailto:m...@msapiro.net]
> Sent: Thursday, November 11, 2010 12:19 AM
> To: Ivan Fetch; MailMan
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Moving / upgrading Mailman from Solaris to
> Linux
> 
> Ivan Fetch wrote:
> >
> >We are planning to move our Mailman installation from Solaris to
> Linux, and upgrade in the process. I'd love to hear from anyone who has
> run production Mailman on Linux.
> >
> >What experiences have list members had with RedHat vs. Ubuntu Mailman
> packages, vs. compiling Mailman from source?
> 
> 
> I run Mailman installed from source on CentOS 5 for my production
> lists. The default Python on this server is the CentOS/RedHat
> 2.4.3-27.el5 (you need both python and python-devel to install Mailman
> from source). I also have Python 2.6.5 on this server installed from
> source. I have installed and run Mailman in production at various
> times with both Python versions. Currently I'm running Mailman
> installed with Python 2.6.5.
> 
> My lists are small to moderate size (<500 members) and low to moderate
> traffic (zero to two or three dozen posts per list daily).
> 
> Everything works fine (I fix the Mailman bugs when I find them ;)
> 

> >At this point, even though I prefer to use packages when possible, I
> am leaning toward compiling Mailman from source because of:
> >1. Red Hat packages are typically more ancient
> >2. Ubuntu packages seem to include non-standard patches to Mailman
> (still sorting this out)
> 
> 
> I've never used the Debian/Ubuntu package, but I've had issues with
> some of their patches. I've fixed the significant problems addressed
> by the Debian patches, at least those I understand, upstream in 2.1.13
> and 2.1.14.

What issues have you had with their patches? E.G> the way they have fixed a bug 
on their own?


> >Additionally, has anyone run into problems with Python packages
> provided by Red Hat and Ubuntu?
> 
> 
> The RedHat Python 2.4.3 package works for me, but it is old. There are
> python26 packages in the epel repository, but I haven't used them.

I will look into the EPEL python, it would be nice to have acces to something 
somewhat newer than what ships with RHEL. Although ... RHEL 6 is out now. :-)

- Ivan

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Redundant Mailman servers

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi John,

-Original Message-
From: mailman-users-bounces+ifetch=du@python.org 
[mailto:mailman-users-bounces+ifetch=du@python.org] On Behalf Of John 
Wingenbach
Sent: Tuesday, November 09, 2010 11:55 AM
To: mailman-users@python.org
Subject: [Mailman-Users] Redundant Mailman servers

Hi,

I am trying to set up redundant/parallel mailman servers.  In order to 
accomplish this, I will have 3 servers which run mailman on them.  One 
server at a time will be determined to be the "admin" point.  However, 
all three will enable distributing email to the pertinent lists.  
Obviously, archival of the mail to the lists is not enabled or supported.

ADMINSERVER -> points to one of SERVERA, SERVERB or SERVERC
Email to the lists gets sent to any of SERVERA, SERVERB or SERVERC (MX 
distributes to all 3 servers).
Configurations from ADMINSERVER are to be sync'd to the other 2 servers.

The problem I am running into is that when I duplicate the lists to the 
other servers, the lists which are "advertised" on the current admin 
server do not show up as advertised.  However, config_list shows the 
lists as advertised.  I am duplicating the following files across the 
servers:

/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases
/var/lib/mailman/lists/*

What am I missing such that /mailman/admin will display the same set of 
advertised lists?

Thanks,
John


I wonder if this could be the host_name option for the mailing lists, vs. 
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST and DEFAULT_URL_HOST on your two other Mailman servers? In 
other words, a difference between the Mailman configured email and web server 
hostnames, among your 3 servers.

- Ivan

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[Mailman-Users] Moving / upgrading Mailman from Solaris to Linux

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

We are planning to move our Mailman installation from Solaris to Linux, and 
upgrade in the process. I'd love to hear from anyone who has run production 
Mailman on Linux.

What experiences have list members had with RedHat vs. Ubuntu Mailman packages, 
vs. compiling Mailman from source?

At this point, even though I prefer to use packages when possible, I am leaning 
toward compiling Mailman from source because of:
1. Red Hat packages are typically more ancient
2. Ubuntu packages seem to include non-standard patches to Mailman (still 
sorting this out)

Additionally, has anyone run into problems with Python packages provided by Red 
Hat and Ubuntu?


Thank you for your time,

Ivan.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Frequent use of clone_member

[Ivan Fetch]

HI Stephen,


-Original Message-
From: Stephen J. Turnbull [mailto:step...@xemacs.org] 
Sent: Thursday, October 21, 2010 10:13 PM
To: Ivan Fetch
Cc: mailman-users@python.org
Subject: [Mailman-Users] Frequent use of clone_member

Ivan Fetch writes:

 > One possibility we're exploring, is to change a student's mailing
 > list subscriptions, when they change their forwarding address. We
 > would iterate through these address changes and run clone_member,
 > like:
 > 
 > Clone_member --remove --admin  o...@our.domain n...@outside.domain

I can't really comment on the burden on the host, but ISTM that this
would be a substantial burden on the students.  They would have to
remember which account is their real account to make any changes, or
to post.  This might be non-trivial for students with multiple
mailboxes.

Students are changing their forward, and we would be trying to "help" them keep 
mailing list subscriptions pointed to that new forwarding address. We have some 
mailing lists which are maintained by professors - although students know they 
are subscribed to the course mailing list, they haven't tended to manage those 
subscriptions.

We are leaning more toward tracking when a forwarding address changes, and 
sending a helpful email about mailing list memberships which may need to be 
changed - but not actually changing anything.


How about having the forwarding address setup update
accept_these_nonmembers, instead?

IF we start filling accept_these_nonmembers, this separate source of addresses 
will need to be cleaned out - this is likely a larger overhead / bucket of 
hurt, than we want to create.


Also, what are you going to do about the old forwarding address?  It
seems likely that in many cases students will want to do things like
receive on their cellphone account but sometimes post from their home
ISP, etc.  Then they change back, creating a real muddle.  OTOH,
allowing dead or dormant accounts to post is a potential issue.

This is one of the reasons we have begun thinking about sending an informative 
email, instead of changing addresses. As soon as we start taking it apon 
ourselves to helpfully change addresses, we will break things for subscribers 
who have other addresses (which happen to be an old forward) subscribed for a 
reason.


We will still need to do mas-address changes for faculty and staff, who will be 
moving to MS Exchange - in some cases, they choose to begin using a different 
form of their email address. I would still be curious to hear from anyone who 
has input on running clone_member to change 200-300 addresses, as part of a 
nightly cron job.


Thanks,

Ivan.

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[Mailman-Users] Frequent use of clone_member

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

We are changing student email from mailboxes, to forwarding addresses. Among 
other challenges, we are exploring various ways to deal with students who are 
subscribed to closed (only subscribers may post) mailing lists.

(There are a lot of similar challenges when switching to an email forwarding 
model - any list members who have gone through this, I would love to pick your 
brain!)

One possibility we're exploring, is to change a student's mailing list 
subscriptions, when they change their forwarding address. We would iterate 
through these address changes and run clone_member, like:

Clone_member --remove --admin  o...@our.domain n...@outside.domain

We could end up processing as many as 500 address changes nightly (running 
clone_member for each one), with each run of clone_member iterating through all 
mailing lists. I'm concerned that this is much more than clone_member was 
intended for.

Can Mailman developers or heavy uses of Mailman comment on this?

Thanks very much,

Ivan.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Storing list admin password in LDAP, or unencrypted?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

On Thu, 8 Jul 2010, Mark Sapiro wrote:


Ivan Fetch wrote:


   We would like to integrate Mailman with a spam quarantine system. List
admin(s) will need to login to manage quarantined messages, and we would
like this login to use the list admin password. I'd like some feedback on
the best way to accomplish this, with Mailman.


   I can think of two ways to accomplish this -

   1. Mailman consults LDAP for the list admin password, and is able to
also set that password (for the web UI and the change_pw script). Mailing
lists are already defined in LDAP for our MTAs.

   2. The Mailman list admin passwords are stored in an unencrypted form,
which we regularly sync to LDAP, for the quarantine system to use.


   IT seems like option 2 would be simpler in terms of code, although less
ideal (because the password wouldn't be encrypted).


   Which method (or is there a third way?) is going to make the most sense
for seamless integration with Mailman?



I suggest a third method.

Do not change Mailman at all.

Periodically, via cron and/or on demand, retrieve the list's 'password'
attribute from lists/listname/config.pck. This can be done with a
Python program using the Mailman API to instantiate the list and get
the password, or it could be done with a withlist script whose process
was simply

def get_list_pw(mlist):
   print mlist.password

or it could be done, e.g., by

/path/to/bin/dumpdb /path/to/lists/$listname/config.pck | \
  grep \'password\' | sed -e s'/^.*: .//' -e 's/.,$//'

This is the encrypted password. Store that in LDAP and have your
quarantine system validate a password by encrypting it using Mailman's
algorithm (a 40-hex-digit representation of a SHA1 hash of the
plaintext) and comparing that to the list's encrypted password.

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





   Great - makes very good sense, thank you. We have tested this by 
getting the list's admin password, removing the hexification (with 
binascii.unhexlify) which leaves the password in SHA1 digest form, then 
base64 encoding the password, and putting it into LDAP.



   How much difference in eficiency is there, between runnig dumpdb vs. 
using python code to only get a list's password? I know dumpdb is doing 
more (because it dumps the entire pck), but is it going to be enough to matter?


   The script we'll write, will probably run every 5 minutes, iterating 
through all lists, and setting password attributes in LDAP for passwords 
which have changed. I'd like to have minimal impact on Mailman (RE: using 
dumpdb).



- Ivan

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[Mailman-Users] Storing list admin password in LDAP, or unencrypted?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

   We would like to integrate Mailman with a spam quarantine system. List 
admin(s) will need to login to manage quarantined messages, and we would 
like this login to use the list admin password. I'd like some feedback on 
the best way to accomplish this, with Mailman.



   I can think of two ways to accomplish this -

   1. Mailman consults LDAP for the list admin password, and is able to 
also set that password (for the web UI and the change_pw script). Mailing 
lists are already defined in LDAP for our MTAs.


   2. The Mailman list admin passwords are stored in an unencrypted form, 
which we regularly sync to LDAP, for the quarantine system to use.



   IT seems like option 2 would be simpler in terms of code, although less 
ideal (because the password wouldn't be encrypted).



   Which method (or is there a third way?) is going to make the most sense 
for seamless integration with Mailman?



Thanks,

Ivan.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Very busy list says send_digests failed, Too many links (fwd)

[Ivan Fetch]

HI Mark,

   Thank you for this. We will end up deleting, since the list ownere do 
not care about digests.


   I didn't realize mailman-users was initially moderating (I never got a 
"held for moderation" reply) - it's been a while - makes sense, though., 
Thank you for clearing that up.




Ivan.


---
Ivan Fetch
University of Denver
Computer Operations, University Technology Services
303-871-3092

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, Mark Sapiro wrote:


Ivan Fetch wrote:


   I'm sorry to email you directly, but I believe the below email (sent
twice) is not making it to the mailman-users list. I just checked archives
and don't see the email there either. My re-post from yesterday, seems to
have been accepted by the python.org mail server:

Aug 27 16:20:23 eros postfix/qmgr[13538]: [ID 197553 mail.info] 169B2C02B:
from=, size=1764, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 27 16:20:29 eros postfix/smtp[17110]: [ID 197553 mail.info] 169B2C02B:
to=, relay=mail.python.org[82.94.164.166]:25,
delay=6.7, delays=0.01/0/5.9/0.73, dsn=2.0.0, status=sent (250 2.0.0 Ok:
queued as A1B94E309)
Aug 27 16:20:29 eros postfix/qmgr[13538]: [ID 197553 mail.info] 169B2C02B:
removed



I suspect you are moderated as a recent subscriber and the moderator
just hasn't approved the latest posts. This happens.



   Have you seen the below - on the mailman-users list, or in a queue
somewhere?



No, I haven't seen it, but I can't see the messages waiting moderation.
But, see below for my response.



-- Forwarded message --
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 16:19:58 -0600 (MDT)
From: Ivan Fetch 
To: mailman-users@python.org
Subject: Very busy list says send_digests failed, Too many links

Apologies - this is a re-post, but I didn't see it hit the list in about 19
hours.


Date: Wed, 26 Aug 2009 21:14:00 -0600 (MDT)
From: Ivan Fetch 
To: mailman-users@python.org
Subject: Very busy list says send_digests failed, Too many links

Hello,


   We had a list get around 30,000 messages today. Eventually, we noticed
emails to this list were really piling up in Mailman's "in" queue, and the
error log showed a lot of:

Aug 26 13:44:22 2009 (9443) send_digests() failed: [Errno 31] Too many links:
'/mail/mailman/mailman/archives/private/list-name/attachments/20090826/9a8f3979'

   I happened to get around this by setting digestable to know, but would like
to know how I should perhaps clean up after this. Most of the emails to this
list, unfortunately were the result of a run-away program sending emails. Will
the next digest cron job die on this many emails and attachments?



Yes, the next cron/senddigests will probably choke too unless you set
the list's digest_send_periodic to No.

The problem is in the list's lists/LISTNAME/digest.mbox file.
Apparently you have a very large number of messages with attachments
and with the same Message-ID:. Scrubber is calculating the directory
in which to store attachments for this message as
/mail/mailman/mailman/archives/private/list-name/attachments/20090826/9a8f3979
(the 9a8f3979 is a hash of the Message-ID:). This directory has so
many files in it that the OS will not allow any more to be created -
thus, the error 31.

You need to either edit the lists/LISTNAME/digest.mbox file and delete
all the 'bad' messages, or if you're not concerned about the digest,
just remove it. You also should remove the
archives/private/list-name/attachments/20090826/9a8f3979 directory.
That should be all the cleanup you need to do other that ensuring that
the run-away program is fixed.

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



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[Mailman-Users] Very busy list says send_digests failed, Too many links

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


   We had a list get around 30,000 messages today. Eventually, we noticed 
emails to this list were really piling up in Mailman's "in" queue, and the 
error log showed a lot of:


Aug 26 13:44:22 2009 (9443) send_digests() failed: [Errno 31] Too many 
links: 
'/mail/mailman/mailman/archives/private/list-name/attachments/20090826/9a8f3979'


   I happened to get around this by setting digestable to know, but would 
like to know how I should perhaps clean up after this. Most of the emails 
to this list, unfortunately were the result of a run-away program sending 
emails. Will the next digest cron job die on this many emails and 
attachments?



Thanks a lot,

Ivan.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] Load-balancing mailman between two servers

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


On Mon, 27 Nov 2006, Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 3:03 PM +1100 11/27/06, Guy Waugh quoted Kim Hawtin:
>
>>>  How/where do you share the incoming mail list aliases that sendmail checks?
>>>
>>>  Also when you create a new list, how to you update the other hosts aliases?
>>>
>>  On each server, in the sendmail aliases file. So, when adding or
>>  removing a list, I have to do the alias changes on each of the two servers.
>
> Hmm.  With postfix, you can specify multiple alias files, some of
> which will get auto-rebuilt as necessary by postfix, others which can
> get manually rebuilt by other processes (like by Mailman, with the
> standard tools it provides).
>
> It's been a while since I mucked around with sendmail, but I have to
> believe that the same is possible there.  Indeed, I believe that the
> technique that is currently used to completely automate this process
> with postfix was adapted from the technique that previously worked
> only with sendmail.


i'm doing this with Sendmail - you can add something like the following 
to your .mc file (E.G. sendmail.mc):

define(`ALIAS_FILE',`/etc/mail/aliases,/mail/mailman/sendmail/sendmail-aliases')dnl

The first file mentioned (/etc/mail/aliases) is typically where 
sendmail looks for it's aliases.  The second 
(/mail/mailman/sendmail/mailman-aliases) lives on shared storage (your NFS 
server).  When you run newaliases, or sendmail -bi (same thing) on either 
machine, the shared sendmail-aliases.db file will be rebuilt.

You would of course have to move your mailman aliases to the other 
aliases file, and change your procedure for creating new lists so that the 
new aliases also end up in the new aliases file.

I believe you're running RHEL?  If you're wanting to give this a try 
with sendmail, you need to have the sendmail-cf RPM installed.  Then you 
can backup sendmail.mc and sendmail.cf, change sendmail.mc, and run make 
sendmail.cf to recreate the .cf file.


Thanks,

Ivan.

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[Mailman-Users] request.pck does not match heldmsg-Listname files

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


I've noticed heldmsg-ListName-* files in mailman/data, which the 
request.pck file for the given list isn't aware of (the pickle only has a 
version string).

Is there something which others have used to iterate the request.pck 
file of all lists, and determine orphaned files in the mailman/data 
directory so they can be deleted?


Thanks,

Ivan Fetch.
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[Mailman-Users] Upgrading from 2.1.5 to 2.1.9

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


IT's (past) time to upgrade our mailman 2.1.5 installation to version 
2.1.9.

I'm wondering whether anyone has experience they'd like to share going 
directly from 2.1.5 to 2.1.9 -- anything to be aware of in terms of the 
upgrade process or user experiences (meaning list administrators and 
members)?


Looking at the upgrade and news files, and searching the archives, the 
only thing I have found is some references to "versions 2.1.6 through 
2.1.8 had issues, try 2.1.9".  I'm not sure exactly what issues 2.1.6 
through 2.1.8 had (besides security issues I see that 2.1.9 fixed).


Thanks for the help,

- Ivan.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] MTA only for Mailman

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

Thank you Heather Madrone, Mike Horwath, and Brad Knowles for your 
replies.


I'm running Postfix other places with mailman and it is indeed very 
nice.  Since this MTA instance is just for handing off to Mailman, we're 
not doing any spam filtering or munging of emails.

I have sendmail working here with Mailman (as a test), but I'm having 
difficulty getting it to ignore local accounts; I'd like it to handle 
aliases (which it is) but not deliver email to local users on the box. 
With Postfix I could just set local_recipient_maps, but I haven't found 
simelar functionality in Sendmail's m4 files yet. ;)  Any Sendmial experts 
out there who know this right off the top of their head?


I certainly could install Postfix in global storage (so all cluster 
nodes can use it) and go that route too.


Thanks,

Ivan Fetch.





On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 10:58 AM -0600 2006-07-27, Ivan Fetch wrote:
>
>> Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailman
>>  and deny anything else?
>
> The issues here are that you need to have certain features in your MTA in 
> order to get that to work well with Mailman, such as a mechanism for adding 
> aliases or some other method of identifying to the MTA which mailing lists 
> are in existence and how to deliver mail to the appropriate addresses for 
> each, etc
>
> In essence, this means that you can use a lighter-weight MTA than a more 
> standard MTA sendmail, postfix, or Exim, but if you go that direction then 
> you're going to be on your own.  Alternatively, you could use sendmail, 
> postfix, or Exim, and just not use those other features of the program that 
> you don't need.
>
>> I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight)
>>  to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm
>>  still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local
>>  accounts.
>
> Sendmail, postfix, and Exim are the three MTAs that integrate most naturally 
> with Mailman.  On python.org (where the mailman-users mailing list is hosted, 
> among many others), we currently use postfix. So, we can pretty much 
> guarantee that the integration there is going to work well.
>
> I've been involved in the postfix community for many years (since the days it 
> was called VMailer), and I can tell you that Wietse has done a lot of things 
> that make postfix a good MTA to use out-of-the-box for mailing lists.
>
> I can also say that postfix is one of the very few programs I know of that 
> can have a truly useful configuration file that is just two or three lines 
> long, with everything else being taken from built-in defaults.
>
>
> Many people in the community also use sendmail, and the integration there is 
> also pretty good -- that is, assuming you're running a pretty standard 
> source-based install, because most vendors do some pretty heavy (and weird) 
> customization of sendmail to work "better" in their environment.
>
> Now, it turns out that John Beck is a longtime member of the Sendmail 
> Consortium (the group that supports the open source version), and has been 
> "the sendmail guy" at Sun for many years, and he's been working to get all 
> those bizarre Sun-isms eliminated from the version they've been shipping. 
> Still, there are some oddities that have remained.
>
> Your choices there are to either install the source-based version of sendmail 
> and get that configured to work in your environment, or figure out what needs 
> to be done to the Sun version in order to get it to work well with Mailman.
>
> From an objective viewpoint, it takes more work to get sendmail configured to 
> work well for mailing lists than it does to get postfix configured to serve 
> that same environment, but if you're more familiar with sendmail then it may 
> be less work to stick with that than to try to rip that out and replace it 
> with a completely different package.  It will also take more work to maintain 
> sendmail suitably in this kind of environment as compared to postfix, but if 
> you're doing lots of mail filtering (e.g., anti-spam or anti-virus 
> processing), then you reach a point where sendmail will scale and perform 
> better than postfix on the same hardware.
>
>
> I can't speak too much for Exim, although I know a number of people in the 
> Exim community make use of Mailman, and they've made it pretty easy to set 
> things up so that you never need to update the aliases or anything in order 
> to get the two working together.  I can tell you that Exim is pretty 
> different from either sendmail or postfix, and

[Mailman-Users] MTA only for Mailman

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,


I'd like to have an MTA who's only purpose is to accept SMTP 
connections for Mailman mailing lists and spawn the appropriate Mailman 
binary.  This MTA will be fed emails from our Sun Internet Mail Server 
(IMS) 5.2 cluster.

We are moving away from having IMS 5.2 pipe to a wrapper, which intern 
spawns the proper Mailman binary, because of an issue with patching 
breaking the IMS pipe channel (omitting the longer story behind this). 
The thought now is that IMS will deliver mail destined for a mailing list 
to another "mailhost" which is running this MTA which will spawn to 
Mailman.  The "Mailman MTA" is just another Ip on the same nodes - 
although it is introducing an extra hop in delivery to mailing lists, it 
factors out the Sun / IMS issue we find outself stuck in...


Is anyone using a light weight MTA to just hand emails off to Mailman 
and deny anything else?

I'm looking at Sun Sendmail (I know, it's definitely not light weight) 
to do this, simply because it's already on the boxes in question - I'm 
still sorting out how to get Sendmail to deliver to aliases, but not local 
accounts.


Thanks for any feedback on MTAs, or a more sensable way to accomplish 
this.

- Ivan Fetch.

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Re: [Mailman-Users] SPAM Control

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Kevin,

Where would you like the spam to be put instead of the hold directory? 
If the spam is filtered to some other folder, there will still be 
something  which will need to be cleaned at some point.  There's always the 
"Discard 
held messages older than this number of days" option in mailman 2.1.6.


Thanks - Ivan.



On Fri, 4 Nov 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> Alas, much simplier Ivan:  Most of my list only allow members to post.
> Most spammers don't bother to subscribe, so their e-mails get deferred.
> Every morning at 8am I get a note telling me how many are pending...
>
> What I'm looking for is something that could sit between Postfix and
> Mailman and filter most of this "stuff" out.  I'm risk adverse, so would
> like it routed somewhere instead of being dropped automatically, but
> protecting all my lists (and users) would be cool.
>
> Kevin
>
>> Hi Kevin,
>>
>> I'm curious, how are you filtering spam - with a spam filtering rule
>> that matches a particular header and holds the message?  If so, do you
>> have lists configured to send notifications for held messages?  We found
>> that this of course generates backscatter ("your message has been held"
>> outbound emails to addresses which are forged or do not exist) - we are
>> looking for other ways to (perhaps) forward emails matching a spam rule to
>> the listname-owner address with a note somewhere about why the owners are
>> receiving the message.
>>
>>
>> Thanks - Ivan.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, 4 Nov 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>>
>>> All -
>>>
>>> Although Mailman does a great job blocking SPAM from my users, the daily
>>> task of purging all defered e-mails (SPAM 99.9% of the time) is growing
>>> weary.
>>>
>>> I'm an AMD-64 Gentoo Linux, Postfix, Mailman server - does anyone have
>>> any
>>> suggestions for a system wide anti-spam tool that integrates well?
>>>
>>> Kevin
>>>
>>>
>>
>
>
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] SPAM Control

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Kevin,

I'm curious, how are you filtering spam - with a spam filtering rule 
that matches a particular header and holds the message?  If so, do you 
have lists configured to send notifications for held messages?  We found 
that this of course generates backscatter ("your message has been held" 
outbound emails to addresses which are forged or do not exist) - we are 
looking for other ways to (perhaps) forward emails matching a spam rule to 
the listname-owner address with a note somewhere about why the owners are 
receiving the message.


Thanks - Ivan.


On Fri, 4 Nov 2005 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> All -
>
> Although Mailman does a great job blocking SPAM from my users, the daily
> task of purging all defered e-mails (SPAM 99.9% of the time) is growing
> weary.
>
> I'm an AMD-64 Gentoo Linux, Postfix, Mailman server - does anyone have any
> suggestions for a system wide anti-spam tool that integrates well?
>
> Kevin
>
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman and multimaster redundancy

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

Hmm - I believe I remember mailmanctl being irritated about it's own 
locking when attempting to run a second instance of mailmanctl accessing 
the same Mailman data.  You can force lock removal, and perhaps the second 
instance would start, but I've never tried that (seemed like a bad idea). 
Perhaps it's time to setup a test bed.


Thanks - Ivan.

On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Mark Sapiro wrote:

> Ivan Fetch wrote:
>>
>>However, you can't have two instances of Mailman running at the same
>> time, acting on the shared data storage (lists, archives, Etc) correct?
>
> I'm not sure that you can't.
>
> Concurrent updates to lists are protected by locks. I think there may
> be an issue with queues. I believe it is possible (but a very small
> window) for two concurrent qrunners processing the same slice of the
> same queue to both pick up the same entry. This might be avoidable by
> having the separate instances process different slices of the queues,
> although this would probably require bin/mailmanctl changes. It may
> also be avoidable by having each instance have it's own qfiles and
> only sharing access to lists/, archives/ and locks/.
>
> There is probably an issue with master-qrunner locks, and you'd
> probably only run the crons on one instance. There is also an issue
> with the data/ directory as held messages are stored there so it may
> need to be shared too.
>
> It may turn out to have too many gotchas, but I wouldn't rule it out
> without investigating.
>
> -- 
> Mark Sapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   The highway is for gamblers,
> San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan
>
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman and multimaster redundancy

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

However, you can't have two instances of Mailman running at the same 
time, acting on the shared data storage (lists, archives, Etc) correct?


- Ivan Fetch.

On Fri, 4 Nov 2005, Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 10:24 PM -0500 2005-11-03, Mordechai T. Abzug wrote:
>
>>  I'd like to set up GNU Mailman for high-availabilty via multimaster
>>  redundancy, ie. with two servers such that configuration and
>>  subscription changes can occur on either server and will automatically
>>  be propagated to the other server.
>>
>>  Can GNU Mailman do this?
>
>   Mailman wasn't really designed to do this sort of thing, but
> there are some features it does have which makes something along
> these lines at least achievable.
>
>   It is easy enough to split up the incoming mail server(s),
> outgoing mail server(s), and front-end proxy web server(s) onto
> separate machines.
>
>   Splitting the Mailman instance itself is a bit more difficult,
> and would need to be done via NFS or other shared network storage
> facility with the appropriate file locking mechanisms, etc  Using
> NFS for this may tend to make the overall installation more brittle
> and less reliable, because many vendors don't fully or properly
> support NFS or shared network storage to the level that you would
> need/desire.  But, that may still be the best method available to you.
>
>
>   I don't know if there is a FAQ entry on this subject in
> particular, but you should search the FAQ Wizard for "performance",
> and search the archives of this list.  It shouldn't be too hard to
> turn up some relevant messages on this topic.
>
> -- 
> Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
> temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
>
> -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
> Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] unknown encoding crashes qrunner

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Stephen - thanks for replying!


In your experience, has this stopped Mailman from processing incoming 
messages?  After soem further investigation, I've seen these same errors 
take place, yet Mailman continues processing messages.  This makes me 
wonder if what ever is affecting qrunner(s) isn't something else...


Thanks,
- Ivan.

On Thu, 6 Oct 2005, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>>>>>> "Ivan" == Ivan Fetch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>
>Ivan> I'm confused as to why the unknown encoding is "unknown" -
>Ivan> can someone shed light on this?
>
> Probably because some less-than-conformant agent put that literal
> string in a Content-Type header.  Try grepping the spool for
> "charset=unknown" (or just "unknown") and look carefully at the
> message found.  I've seen that "charset" in spam messages (at least).
>
> BTW, from Mailman's (actually, Mailman just passes the buck to Python)
> point of view, it's unknown because there is no codec (character
> encoder/decoder modules) for a charset named "unknown".  You'd run
> into the same thing if the charset were, say, "hellspark".  I get this
> kind of thing all the time (in a different Python application) because
> Mac OS X defaults to "X-Mac-Japanese" in my locale.  :-(
>
>
> -- 
> School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
> University of TsukubaTennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
>   Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
>  ask what your business can "do for" free software.
>
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[Mailman-Users] unknown encoding crashes qrunner

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

We have occasions where mailman (2.1.5) seases processing messages sent 
to lists - looking in the error log I have this (which I am not entirely sure 
is related, but it seems plausable):

** begin log **
Oct 05 08:44:51 2005 (15118) Uncaught runner exception: 
unknown encoding: unknown
Oct 05 08:44:51 2005 (15118) Traceback (most recent call last):
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 111, in _oneloop
 self._onefile(msg, msgdata)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/Runner.py", line 167, in _onefile
 keepqueued = self._dispose(mlist, msg, msgdata)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py", line 130, in 
_dispose
 more = self._dopipeline(mlist, msg, msgdata, pipeline)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Queue/IncomingRunner.py", line 153, in 
_dopipeline
 sys.modules[modname].process(mlist, msg, msgdata)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/CookHeaders.py", line 74, in 
process
 prefix_subject(mlist, msg, msgdata)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/CookHeaders.py", line 262, in 
prefix_subject
 h.append(s, c)
   File "/usr/local/mailman/pythonlib/email/Header.py", line 285, in append
 s = s.encode(outcodec, errors)
LookupError: unknown encoding: unknown

Oct 05 08:44:51 2005 (15118) SHUNTING: 
1128523491.012949+8a483505bad6e02364dde9314038b3578d06


** end log **


I've found mention of the bug at:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=100103&aid=974290&group_id=103


and further discussion on the thread at:
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-developers/2004-December.txt


however I'm in-need of some help further diagnosing whether the above 
error log snippet and mailman bug is actually the cause, and how to 
resolve the issue.  I'm confused as to why the unknown encoding is 
"unknown" - can someone shed light on this?


We are looking to upgrade to 2.1.6, but would prefer to do it later in 
the year.


Thanks -- Ivan.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Synchronizing Mailman between two servers.

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

i'm looking at this for our setup as well.  How are others handling 
the Mailman processes (qrunners) starting on a second server once the first 
server has gone down, and switching back to the first server once it has 
recovered?

Mailman's locks are usually not cleaned up properly when a server 
unexpectedly fails - although we could force the locks to be removed and 
start mailman processes on the second machine, we'll need to be sure that 
the first machine is really "dead".  I assume two machines trying to run 
qrunners on the same mailman directories at once is not a good thing.


This brings me to search for a way to insure that even if other 
services on a machine are not available, Mailman is certainly not 
operating on the Mailman directories before I try starting Mailman 
processes on a second machine.  Perhaps looking at access / 
modification times of particualr files or directories, relative to the 
current time?  Are there any ideas or comments from others doing or 
looking into this?


- Ivan Fetch.



>>  I'm very interested in the solution you chose, and in how well it works
>>  for you.
>
>   Sorry, I missed the original message.
>
>>  I'm in the process of designing a fault-tolerant mailman installation,
>>  and any wisdom from experience would be very useful.
>
>   Generally speaking, I don't think that many people try to do
> this.  You can off-load the web processing with multiple front-end
> web proxies, and you can off-load the mail processing with multiple
> inbound and outbound mail servers (usually best kept as separate
> groups, since the anti-spam, anti-virus, and certain other
> requirements are different for inbound versus outbound use), and the
> rest is just Mailman itself.
>
>   But, if you do want to go the whole nine yards, the Mailman
> programmers have been pretty careful to keep everything relatively
> NFS-safe, so you should just be able to have an NFS filesystem which
> is then mounted on all of the Mailman servers (preferably served by a
> high availability/redundant NFS server cluster).  Doing things over
> NFS will slow down individual operations, but the overall aggregate
> throughput might be able to be higher, if the NFS server has the
> right architecture and you spread the load out across enough Mailman
> servers, etc
>
>>>  Any thoughts on what is the best way to synchronize mailman databases
>>>  between to linux boxes?
>
>   Mailman doesn't really use databases.  At least, not
> out-of-the-box.  There are third-party unsupported patches to allow
> database member adapters, but that's about it.
>
>   Mailman stores pretty much everything into Python "pickle" files,
> which is a particular binary Python-specific file format that can be
> quickly saved and re-loaded in the native binary format.
>
>>>  If my alias_maps are defined the same in /etc/postfix/main.cf are the
>>>  same on both hosts can I just duplicate my /usr/lib/mailman and
>>>  /var/lib/mailman directories?
>
>   Duplicate?  What do you mean by "duplicate"?  Just once?  If so,
> then the directories would get out-of-sync.  You'd have to keep all
> the directories in sync somehow.
>
>   In a nearline backup method, something as simple as rsync would
> suffice, and would potentially only lose any information that was
> written since the last rsync.
>
>   In a production OLTP type of environment, you'd have to use
> shared filesystems between the sets of machines, and you'd have to
> make sure that those shared filesystems implement all the necessary
> cluster-wide locking facilities, etc... to keep Mailman working
> correctly.
>
> -- 
> Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>
> "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
> temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
>
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> Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Emails with a Subject in Chinese to a Mailing List

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi,

Ah exactly - I believe this is what we've got on our test box.


Thanks - Ivan.



On Sat, 27 Aug 2005, Bruce Wang wrote:

> On 8/27/05, Ivan Fetch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> We've encountered this issue, and (long story shorter) it is fixed in
>> Mailman 2.1.6 if you install the codecs for Python (I believe they come
>> with Python 2.4).
> and if you are using Python prior to 2.4 say, 2.3.4 etc, you can try cjkcodecs
> http://cjkpython.i18n.org
> -- 
> simple is good
>
>
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Emails with a Subject in Chinese to a Mailing List

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

We've encountered this issue, and (long story shorter) it is fixed in 
Mailman 2.1.6 if you install the codecs for Python (I believe they come 
with Python 2.4).

This issue works now for me on a Mailman 2.1.6 test box.  IF you are 
still having difficulty after looking into the codecs for Python, send me 
an email and I'll look more into what I did (this seems like a while ago). 
I believe the codecs are mentioned in the mailman FAQ actually.



Thanks - Ivan.


On Fri, 12 Aug 2005, JC Dill wrote:

> game lover wrote:
>> I am currently using Mailman 2.1.5 provided by a hosting service.
>> When I send emails with a subject in Chinese to a mailing list that I
>> created in Mailman, the emails are always discarded without any
>> notice to the senders and recipients.  Would anyone please help me to
>> solve this issue?  I will appreciate any information on this issue
>
> As your second post (presumably with Chinese characters in the subject
> and body) to this list shows, Chinese characters go thru without any
> problems.  Have you asked your hosting service to look into your problem
> for you?  I suspect your messages are being discarded by a spam filter
> at your host and are never reaching Mailman.
>
> jc
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Re: [Mailman-Users] postfix and mailman issues

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Mike,

 The "VirtualDomain.org IGNORE" line can be in /etc/postfix/virtual.


 What happens if you add @localhost to the end of a line in 
/usr/local/mailman/data/virtual-mailman,, then run postalias on it:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]


 This is kind of a stab in the dark RE: Postfix's MyDestination being 
appended to the end of the right side of the virtual map  when it has no 
host part.  I may be able to experiment with this later on a box with a 
test list.


Thanks - Ivan.


On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Michael GIbbs wrote:

> Ivan,
>
>   My line is washingtongamers.org   IGNORE
>
> The docs say the second part of that (DOMAIN, IGNORE) can be anything as 
> postfix ignores it.  I know the
> virtual domain works as I can receive mail to an email address with 
> washingtongamers.org and it get correctly redirected
> to an offsite email address destination (aka send to 
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] gets accepted and correctly
> sent to [EMAIL PROTECTED]).  My question is, is that line actually talking 
> about adding the above to virtual-mailman
> and not virtual?
>
> Mike
>
> Ivan Fetch wrote:
>
>> Hi Mike,
>> 
>>Looking in README.POSTFIX (part of the Mailman source, although I don't 
>> see it with 2.1.6), it does say:
>> 
>> "First, you need to set up the Postfix virtual alias domains as
>> described in the Postfix documentation (see Postfix's virtual(5)
>> manpage).  Note that it's your responsibility to include the
>> "virtual-alias.domain anything" line as described manpage; Mailman
>> will not include this line in virtual-mailman.  I highly encourage
>> you to make sure your virtual alias domains are working properly
>> before integrating with Mailman."
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>DO you have this line in /etc/postfix/virtual:
>> # note the "DOMAIN" part can really be anything
>> washingtongamers.org DOMAIN
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Thanks - Ivan.
>> 
>> On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Michael GIbbs wrote:
>> 
>>> Ivan,
>>> 
>>>   I have the right .db files in /usr/local/mailman/data, as I did run 
>>> genaliases.  I get no errors wihle running it.
>>> 
>>> As for my alias_map settings I have this:
>>> 
>>> #  Map config Settings
>>> alias_database = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases
>>> alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, 
>>> hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
>>> 
>>> # Virtual config Settings
>>> virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, 
>>> hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/virtual-mailman
>>> 
>>> After rerunning genaliases and restarting everything, I get this error, 
>>> which seems to still be rewriting the domain name:
>>> 
>>> Jul  1 00:31:51 mail postfix/smtp[10936]: 53E73340187: 
>>> to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, orig_to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, r
>>> elay=mail.gibbs-family.org[204.157.3.80], delay=0, status=bounced (host 
>>> mail.gibbs-family.org[204.157.3.80] said: 550 5.1.1
>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command))
>>> 
>>> Do I need to add to the top of virtual-mailman:
>>> 
>>> washingtongamers.org  IGNORE
>>> 
>>> /etc/postfix/virtual contains washingtongamres.org aliases not related to 
>>> the mailing list?  Could this be causing the problem?
>>> 
>>> Mike
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> Ivan Fetch wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Hi Michael,
>>>> 
>>>>It sounds like you may be putting your Mailman aliases (pipes to the 
>>>> mailman binary) in your /etc/postfix/virtual file.  Mailman's Postfix 
>>>> virtual domain integration populates a Mailman specific virtual, and 
>>>> aliases file, located in /usr/local/mailman/data.
>>>> 
>>>>If you haven't done this already, you might want to run 
>>>> /usr/local/mailman/bin/genaliases
>>>>to create the Mailman virtual-mailman and aliases files that Postfix 
>>>> will use (you already have correct lines for this in the Postfix main.cf 
>>>> file).
>>>> 
>>>>When running genaliases do you get any errors about running postalias 
>>>> or postmap?  You may need to set the variables POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD and 
>>>> POSTFIX_MAP_CMD in the Mailman mm_cfg.py file, so mailman knows where the 
>>>> postalias and postmap commands reside.
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>>In t

Re: [Mailman-Users] postfix and mailman issues

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Mike,

Looking in README.POSTFIX (part of the Mailman source, although I don't 
see it with 2.1.6), it does say:

"First, you need to set up the Postfix virtual alias domains as
 described in the Postfix documentation (see Postfix's virtual(5)
 manpage).  Note that it's your responsibility to include the
 "virtual-alias.domain anything" line as described manpage; Mailman
 will not include this line in virtual-mailman.  I highly encourage
 you to make sure your virtual alias domains are working properly
 before integrating with Mailman."



DO you have this line in /etc/postfix/virtual:
# note the "DOMAIN" part can really be anything
washingtongamers.org DOMAIN



Thanks - Ivan.

On Fri, 1 Jul 2005, Michael GIbbs wrote:

> Ivan,
>
>   I have the right .db files in /usr/local/mailman/data, as I did run 
> genaliases.  I get no errors wihle running it.
>
> As for my alias_map settings I have this:
>
> #  Map config Settings
> alias_database = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases
> alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
>
> # Virtual config Settings
> virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual, 
> hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/virtual-mailman
>
> After rerunning genaliases and restarting everything, I get this error, which 
> seems to still be rewriting the domain name:
>
> Jul  1 00:31:51 mail postfix/smtp[10936]: 53E73340187: 
> to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, orig_to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, r
> elay=mail.gibbs-family.org[204.157.3.80], delay=0, status=bounced (host 
> mail.gibbs-family.org[204.157.3.80] said: 550 5.1.1
> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>... User unknown (in reply to RCPT TO command))
>
> Do I need to add to the top of virtual-mailman:
>
> washingtongamers.org  IGNORE
>
> /etc/postfix/virtual contains washingtongamres.org aliases not related to the 
> mailing list?  Could this be causing the problem?
>
> Mike
>
>
>
> Ivan Fetch wrote:
>
>> Hi Michael,
>> 
>>It sounds like you may be putting your Mailman aliases (pipes to the 
>> mailman binary) in your /etc/postfix/virtual file.  Mailman's Postfix 
>> virtual domain integration populates a Mailman specific virtual, and 
>> aliases file, located in /usr/local/mailman/data.
>> 
>>If you haven't done this already, you might want to run 
>> /usr/local/mailman/bin/genaliases
>>to create the Mailman virtual-mailman and aliases files that Postfix 
>> will use (you already have correct lines for this in the Postfix main.cf 
>> file).
>> 
>>When running genaliases do you get any errors about running postalias or 
>> postmap?  You may need to set the variables POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD and 
>> POSTFIX_MAP_CMD in the Mailman mm_cfg.py file, so mailman knows where the 
>> postalias and postmap commands reside.
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>In terms of the error you refer to in your message below, I don't 
>> believe that you can have pipes to commands in your Postfix 
>> /etc/postfix/virtual domain map.  Instead you need to have (this is what 
>> mailman does  - see above):
>> 
>>Your Postfix virtual file might contain:
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-admin
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-bounces
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-confirm
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-join
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-leave
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-owner
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-request
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-subscribe
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-unsubscribe
>> 
>> 
>>Your Postfix aliases file might then contain:
>> ## ListName mailing list
>> ListName: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post ListName"
>> ListName-admin: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin ListName"
>> ListName-bounces: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces ListName"
>> ListName-confirm: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman confirm ListName"
>> ListName-join: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman join ListName"
>> ListName-leave: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman leave ListName"
>> ListName-owner: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman owner ListName"
>> ListName-request: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request ListName"
>> ListName-subscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe ListName"
>> ListName-unsubscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe 
>> ListName"
>> 
>> 
>> 
>>Let me know if I am not making sense, or if you still have problems, I'm 
>> happy to try to help

Re: [Mailman-Users] postfix and mailman issues

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi Michael,

It sounds like you may be putting your Mailman aliases (pipes to the 
mailman binary) in your /etc/postfix/virtual file.  Mailman's Postfix 
virtual domain integration populates a Mailman specific virtual, and 
aliases file, located in /usr/local/mailman/data.

If you haven't done this already, you might want to run 
/usr/local/mailman/bin/genaliases
to create the Mailman virtual-mailman and aliases files that Postfix 
will use (you already have correct lines for this in the Postfix main.cf 
file).

When running genaliases do you get any errors about running postalias 
or postmap?  You may need to set the variables POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD and 
POSTFIX_MAP_CMD in the Mailman mm_cfg.py file, so mailman knows where the 
postalias and postmap commands reside.



In terms of the error you refer to in your message below, I don't 
believe that you can have pipes to commands in your Postfix 
/etc/postfix/virtual domain map.  Instead you need to have (this is what 
mailman does  - see above):

Your Postfix virtual file might contain:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-admin
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-bounces
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-confirm
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-join
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-leave
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-owner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-request
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-subscribe
[EMAIL PROTECTED] ListName-unsubscribe


Your Postfix aliases file might then contain:
## ListName mailing list
ListName: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post ListName"
ListName-admin: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin ListName"
ListName-bounces: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman bounces ListName"
ListName-confirm: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman confirm ListName"
ListName-join: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman join ListName"
ListName-leave: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman leave ListName"
ListName-owner: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman owner ListName"
ListName-request: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman request ListName"
ListName-subscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman subscribe ListName"
ListName-unsubscribe: "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman unsubscribe ListName"



Let me know if I am not making sense, or if you still have problems, 
I'm happy to try to help.

Thanks,
Ivan Fetch.

On Thu, 30 Jun 2005, Michael GIbbs wrote:

> Greetings,
>
>I have been trying to integrate Mailman 2.1.6 with Postfix  2.2.4
> with no luck.  I have followed the instructions on the Mailman
> website for Postfix, and I have installed Postfix-style Virtual
> Domains.  The lists domain name used is different then the mail servers
> actual domain.
>
>When I send mail to @virtual-domain.com, it gets sent to
> the right mail address (which is NOT located locally).  If,
> however, a mail is sent for an alias under mailman
> @virtual-domain.com, I get the following:
>
> Jun 30 02:11:05 mail postfix/smtp[27605]: E7118340227:
> to=<|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post [EMAIL PROTECTED]>, o
> rig_to=<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, relay=mail.domain.com[ipaddress
> removed], delay=1, status=bounced (host
> mail.domain.com[ipaddress removed] said: 550 5.7.1
> <"|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post gamer"@domain.com>... Cannot
> mail dire
> ctly to programs (in reply to RCPT TO command))
>
> Here is my Postfix main.cf:
>
> #
> # Postfix Basic Configuration Settings
> #
> myhostname = mail.domain.com
> mydomain = domain.com
> myorigin = $mydomain
> mydestination = $myhostname localhost.$mydomain localhost
> mynetworks = /29
> relay_domains = /etc/postfix/relay_domains
> readme_directory = no
> sample_directory = /etc/postfix
> sendmail_path = /usr/sbin/sendmail
> html_directory = no
> setgid_group = postdrop
> command_directory = /usr/sbin
> manpage_directory = /usr/local/man
> daemon_directory = /usr/libexec/postfix
> newaliases_path = /usr/bin/newaliases
> mailq_path = /usr/bin/mailq
> queue_directory = /var/spool/postfix
> mail_owner = postfix
> unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550
> local_recipient_maps = $virtual_alias_maps $alias_maps unix:passwd.byname
>
> smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated
> permit_mynetworks check_relay_domains
> smtpd_sender_restrictions =  permit_sasl_authenticated permit_mynetworks
> reject_sender_login_mismatch
>
> #  Map config Settings
> alias_database = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases,
> hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
> alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/aliases, hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
>
> #virtual map config
> virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual,
> hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/virtual-mailman
>
> # sasl config
> broken_sasl_auth_clients = yes
&g

[Mailman-Users] bounce_processing=0 has no affect?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,

I've searched mailing list archives and the bug tracker on this, but 
have not come up with anything relevant yet:

I've got a couple of mailing lists (Mailman 2.1.5) for which 
bounce_processing is set to 0, yet Mailman still processes bounces 
(disabling delivery, then unsubscribing users who exceed the 
thresholds).

AM I misunderstanding the description of the bounce_processing option, 
or is there a patch I have yet to discover?


Thank you - Ivan Fetch.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] What am I missing: HTML messages are being stripped?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   Thank you Brad and Mark for your replies.
   The multipart/alternative and Mailman picking the "first alternative" 
was what I was overlooking.

   Apologies for not doing more searching before posting - trying to do 
too many things at once. :)

- Ivan.

On Thu, 24 Mar 2005, Mark Sapiro wrote:
Ivan Fetch wrote:
   If I turn off content filtering for the list, HTML messages arrive ok,
however it seems as though we should be able to have content filtering
turned on yet HTML messages passing through unharmed with the settings
indicated above - what am I missing?
The HTML parts that are being removed are one subpart of a
multipart/alternative part. When content filtering is enabled, it
always selects only the first remaining part (after any filtering)
from a multipart/alternative group for delivery to the list.
The fourth paragraph of the description on the Content Filtering page
says:
After this initial filtering, any multipart  attachments that are empty
are removed. If the outer message is left empty after this filtering,
then the whole message is discarded. Then, each multipart/alternative
section will be replaced by just the first alternative that is non-
empty after filtering.
The last sentence describes this behavior.
This has been discussed many times on this list. See
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2005-March/043172.html
for a recent thread or go to
http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Amail.python.org+inurl%3Amailman-users+multipart%2Falternative
--
Mark Sapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>   The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, Californiabetter use your sense - B. Dylan

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[Mailman-Users] What am I missing: HTML messages are being stripped?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   Probably a temporary brain moment here, but our lists are stripping 
HTML messages, although the settings are as follows for content filtering:

filter_content is yes, filter_mime_types and pass_mime_types are both 
empty, and convert_html_to_plaintext is set to no.

   If I turn off content filtering for the list, HTML messages arrive ok, 
however it seems as though we should be able to have content filtering 
turned on yet HTML messages passing through unharmed with the settings 
indicated above - what am I missing?

Thanks,
Ivan Fetch.
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[Mailman-Users] Accepting "implicit destination" messages based on other headers?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   I'm wondering whether it is currently possible, or whether there is 
something on the drawing board, to allow accepting of messages normally 
held for "implicit destination" based on other headers than To or CC?   We 
would like to accept certain messages based on another header, without 
opening things up to much by putting something overly general in 
acceptable_aliases.

Thank you,
Ivan Fetch.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Mailman maintenance from the shell and "mailman" group

[Ivan Fetch]

Hi John,
   Thanks for the reply - this confirms what I figured was the case (but 
you never know right?).

   We plan to just have these users running the Mailman binaries and some 
other useful scripts we wrote which wrap around / combine functionality 
in the mailman binaries for common tasks.

Thanks - Ivan.
On Mon, 21 Mar 2005, John Dennis wrote:
On Mon, 2005-03-21 at 11:01 -0700, Ivan Fetch wrote:
Hello,
We'd like to have multiple people manage our mailman installation via
shell access, and are looking at adding their Unix accounts to the mailman
group.  This seems to work, but I wanted to verify that this doesn't cause
any problems down the road.
We could have folks login as the mailman
account, but it'd be nicer if they could use their own accounts.
Yes, and no. It depends on what they're doing, but in general I would
suspect this will work fine as long as they stick to using the command
line interface (CLI), e.g. whats in the bin directory. Here is the
issue:
All of mailman's security is group based. As long as the user is just
running commands and is in the group mailman you should be fine.
However, if they edit or create files on their own they will end up
having themselves as the owner, and their primary group, which will not
be mailman. *SOME* of these files have the potential to exhibit
permission problems. So as long as they stick to the CLI and are not
editing python files you should be fine, if they are creating/modifying
files by using a text editor, you could end up with bad permissions.
--
John Dennis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

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[Mailman-Users] Mailman maintenance from the shell and "mailman" group

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   We'd like to have multiple people manage our mailman installation via 
shell access, and are looking at adding their Unix accounts to the mailman 
group.  This seems to work, but I wanted to verify that this doesn't cause 
any problems down the road.

   We could have folks login as the mailman 
account, but it'd be nicer if they could use their own accounts.

Thank you,
Ivan Fetch.
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Re: [Mailman-Users] Setting Up a List Via Command Line?

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   Apologies this reply is a bit late - I've been working on something 
simelar for our setup and just got it to do what I want this morning.

   For completeness sake, here is my process (we are migrating mailing 
lists to mailman):

   1. Create the list with:
newlist list_name list_admin separately_randomly_generated_password
   2. As we're migrating lists from some home made list software, convert 
the list parameters to python variables, store those variables in a file, 
then apply them to the list with:
config_list -i file_of_python_variables.py list_name

   3. Convert our list of existing subscribers to a file with one address 
per line, and subscribe them with:
sync_members -a=no -g=no -w=no -f file_of_subscribers list_name
  Note - I'm pondering not disabling the subscription welcome, and 
changing the template to contain migration specific info for the list 
subscribers.

   4. Run a couple of python functions against the list to (1) fix the "-1 
Pending Requests" issue and (2) set the moderator bit to False for the 
list administrator:
withlist -q -l -r du.fixNegativePendingRequests list_name
withlist -q -l -r du.setMemberModeratedFlag list_name address_of_list_admin

   Here is the python (du.py) with the two functions - this can definitely 
be improved as soon as I actually learn python:
# DU mailman Modules
# This should live in the base Mailman install directory to be seen by the withlist Mailman binary.

from Mailman import mm_cfg
from Mailman.Errors import NotAMemberError
# Set a member's moderator flag to on or off
# e.g. to disable moderation: setMemberModeratedFlag listname, email_address, ''
def setMemberModeratedFlag (mlist, addr, mod):
#   print "Setting moderator flag to ",mod," for ",addr
mlist.setMemberOption (addr, mm_cfg.Moderate, mod)
mlist.Save()
# Error checking would be nice as soon as I get the syntax right.
# Fix an issue where a newly created mailing list sends emails to the list admin
# about "-1 pending requests" because a requests python pickle does not yet 
exist.
# BY querying the list for the number of requests pending, this file will get 
created.
def fixNegativePendingRequests (mlist):
klugevar=mlist.NumRequestsPending()
mlist.Save()

   I hope this helps if you haven't already solved your problem,
Ivan Fetch.
On Thu, 3 Feb 2005, Hunter Hillegas wrote:
I have a need to do some list setup from the command line via another
program. I am running 2.1.5.
I am able to create the list and add members.
One thing I would like to do is to set the moderation bit to true for all
members and then set it to false for a single member.
I am creating an announce list programatically.
I am able to import the members no problem. How can I perform the moderation
settings changes?
Thanks,
Hunter
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Re: [Mailman-Users] respond_to_post_requests and header_filter_rules

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   Thank you for your reply -- I'm using Mailman 2.1.5 (sorry for not 
mentioning this previously).  We'd rather be able to configure the filters 
to hold (not discard) spam, at least for those lists where the list 
administrators prefer to double check what is being tagged as spam.

   Is the help text of respond_to_post_requests inaccurate in how it 
claims that notifying posters of held messages excludes spam filtering?

Thank you - Ivan Fetch.
---
Ivan Fetch
University of Denver
Computer Operations, University Technology Services
303-871-3092
On Tue, 1 Feb 2005, Tokio Kikuchi wrote:
Hi,
Ivan Fetch wrote:
Hello,
   I'm wondering whether there is a way to have respond_to_post_requests 
set to yes (so that senders will be notified if their message is held due 
to posting to a members-only list, their message exceeds mailman's size 
limit, Etc), yet not send notifications to senders who's messages are held 
because they match a filter rule (privacy | spam ).

   The help section of respond_to_post_requests says the following, which 
leads me to believe that it will not notify senders of messages which 
match spam filter rules:
"Approval notices are sent when mail triggers certain of the limits except 
routine list moderation and spam filters, for which notices are not sent. 
This option overrides ever sending the notice."

Looks like this detail is outdated. I think new spam filters should be used 
to silently discard the known spams. Ivan, what version are you using? Newer 
version has more generic header_filter_rules to hold/reject/discard such 
messages.

Developers, I think I will remove 'spam filters' from the detailed 
description above but what is the 'routine list moderation'? I think 
list-wide moderation was replaced by per-member moderation, right?
   However when I send a message to a list and it matches against a spam 
filter, I receive an email back notifying me that my message was held 
because a filter was matched.  It would be nice to be able to avoid 
responding to messages which Mailman matches against the spam filters, as 
often the From address is forged anyhow...

   IS there something I'm missing which will give me the behavior I'm 
looking for RE: spam filtering?

Thank you - Ivan Fetch.

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http://weather.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/

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[Mailman-Users] respond_to_post_requests and header_filter_rules

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   I'm wondering whether there is a way to have respond_to_post_requests 
set to yes (so that senders will be notified if their message is held due 
to posting to a members-only list, their message exceeds mailman's size 
limit, Etc), yet not send notifications to senders who's messages are 
held because they match a filter 
rule (privacy | spam ).

   The help section of respond_to_post_requests says the following, which leads me to believe that it will not notify senders 
of messages which match spam filter rules:
"Approval notices are sent when mail triggers certain of the limits except 
routine list moderation and spam filters, for which notices are not sent. 
This option overrides ever sending the notice."

   However when I send a message to a list and it matches against a spam 
filter, I receive an email back notifying me that my message was held 
because a filter was matched.  It would be nice to be able to avoid 
responding to messages which Mailman matches against the spam filters, as 
often the From address is forged anyhow...

   IS there something I'm missing which will give me the behavior I'm 
looking for RE: spam filtering?

Thank you - Ivan Fetch.
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[Mailman-Users] Mailman (almost) Failover with --with-var-prefix

[Ivan Fetch]

Hello,
   We're installing mailman on two machines so that if one machine were to 
experience problems, we can move a record in DNS and begin using the other 
host.  Rather than doing something to sync the lists, archives, Etc on 
both machines, I plan to store those things on a shared disk (not NFS) by 
using the --with-var-path=/path-to-shared-disk configure option.

   I'm wondering whether anyone has done this, and whether there might be 
problems with two instances of mailman accessing these files (e.g. I will 
start the mailman master process on each machine as well as the web 
server; potentually both machines could be accessing the shared Mailman 
data at the same time)?

Thanks,
Ivan Fetch.
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