[Mailman-Developers] Big announcement!

[John Viega]

On Thu, May 07, 1998 at 01:29:36AM -0400, Tom Dyas wrote:
> 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. 

If I understand you correctly, what you're looking for is there.  A
confirmation step was added recently.  I think it needs to be improved
upon to the point where you can just reply to the message to confirm
(as long as some string is in the subject, say).  For things other
than subscribe, the password is necessary from the web, and the email
address is checked from mail commands (I don't think the password is).


> 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. 

Sure, that's a good idea for large lists.  I think you should be able
to set the period, though.  I run a few large lists where I'd like to
do that 2 times a year only.  I'll add it to the todo list today.

> 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.

Well, the core of mailman is in the modules directory.  The maillist
file is perhaps the best place to start; subsystems such as digest
handling and bounce detection are in other files in that directory,
and are included by multiple inheritance.

The commands that interact with the email addresses, the cgi scripts,
etc.  All live in different subdirectories.  They all end up
instantiating mailing lists to do their work.

> 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. 

I don't know if I understand this one.  Do you want mylist-outgoing to
be the sender address as opposed to mylist-admin?

John