[Mailman-Developers] Big announcement!

[Scott]

On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 01:29:36AM -0400, Tom Dyas wrote:
| On Wed, 6 May 1998, John Viega wrote:
| 
| > I've got a few things to announce.  First, I've come up w/ a big
| > Mailman TODO list that is now on the web.  If you want to tackle
| > something off that list, just let this mailing list know, and go at
| > it!
| > 
| > The TODO list is at: http://www.list.org/todo.html
| > 
| > Please submit additions, corrections, etc. to me.
| 
| What about support for a "confirm" command similar to listserv? While the
| password scheme is nice, it seems possible for a bad person to spoof an
| email from an unsuspecting user with the password in the command after
| they have used the WWW interface. 

this is in the works by me.  if i understand correctly, the consensus
was to require confirmations.  i have them working in an offshoot
branch of mailman, and plan to put together and post patches against
the most recent distribution next week sometime. in the meantime,
sorry, i'm real busy with other stuff.

| FYI, I help run the Linux development lists on vger.rutgers.edu in my
| spare time. I have seen _many_ forged requests to Majordomo that come in
| as requests for approval. If mailman were to send out a unique value
| determined only by it and only sent to the subscriber, then there is a
| much better guarantee that it was the subscriber who confirmed the
| subscription request. 

that's just what it will do.

| An secondary feature would be to send out a confirmation request to all
| current subscribers for them to stay on the list like once a month. The
| Bugtraq list does this using ListServ. While not many lists would use it,
| it would be nice. 

hmmm, seems like an idea.  what do you do with the members who don't
respond in 2 weeks because they're on vacation?

| I can hack on some of this but are there any relevant parts of mailman I
| should consider for this? I have programmed in Python before so I just
| need pointers to right files and such.

i've already got it done, and just need to put it to the newest
release.  no reason to be redundant about development...

| Btw, I am going to try out mailman on a CVS commits list (vger cvs is home
| to linux/sparc) that I am going to make on vger. Vger uses the zmailer
| MTA. Is there any way to make mailman use an "outgoing"-style list alias? 
| Zmailer is very good about sending out mail if it has all of the
| destinations at once since it can group nearby domains and such to send to
| exploder sites. 

not that i know with the addresses per se, but you can set the maximum
outgoing connections for each list.  for vmailer, it would probably be
good to just have that number be <= the size of the list.  same
effect. 

BTW.  vmailer is great, can't wait till it goes beta...

scott