[Mailman-Developers] Re: [Mailman-Users] Virtual Hosts -- can mailman handle them better?

Harald Meland mailman-developers@python.org
16 Aug 1999 01:03:04 +0200


[Tauren Mills]

> I just installed Mailman and love it!  Great work!

Thanks, glad you like it!

> But the /mailman/admin page shows all of the lists on the server
> whether they are for that domain or not (unless the lists are not
> publicly displayed).  Not so good.

Yup -- the admin CGI script hasn't been made aware of virtual domains
yet.  Doing so would probably be quite easy, but I think the current
support for virtual domains is a bit shoddy, so I've been putting it
off...

> Also, if I send an email to clientlist-request@clientdomain.com with
> the command "help", the response email comes back from
> clientlist-request@mydomain.com.

This can be configured -- see the "Host name this list prefers"
setting on the general options page.

However, if you have several lists with the same localpart name in
different domains (i.e. "foobar@dom1.com" and "foobar@dom2.org"),
you'll have to assign them different Mailman-internal names.

I'd like to allow full email addresses as Mailman-internal list names
to alleviate this.  Then, the site admin could maintain some sort of a
webserver<->maildomain cross reference (available to Mailman), and two
settings on the general options page would no longer be needed.

This would increase the need for easy internal renaming of a list, as
domain changes would essentially be a change in the internal list
name.

Opinions, anyone?

> It also has links and email addresses throughout the email that
> point to http://www.mydomain.com/mailman/listinfo/clientlist

See the "Base URL for Mailman web interface" setting in the general
options page.

> Lastly, when I execute the "newlist" command, the email that gets
> automatically sent to the administrator refers to URLs at
> mydomain.com.  I would love to have a way to have that email refer
> to URLs at clientdomain.com.

I'm not aware of any easy solution to that problem.  Sure, we could
add another option to the "newlist" script for specifying the list's
default URL (and another for it's mail domain), but I don't think
that's a particularly neat solution...

> I'm sure there are all sorts of other little things that could be
> done to make Mailman support VirtualHosts better.  Are there ways to
> deal with these issues?  If not, do people think that they are worth
> adding to the product?

I think better support for virtual hosts (or multiple domains, or
whatever this kind of feature really /should/ be called :) are
important, so my answer would definitely be yes.
-- 
Harald