[Mailman-Developers] Mailman 1.0b7 bug reports

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "DD" == Detlev Droege <droege@uni-koblenz.de> writes:

    DD> We did set up Mailman at
    DD> http://mailhost.uni-koblenz.de/mailman/admin/ mostly to admin
    DD> local user groups. I'm the list-admin of the single non-local
    DD> group (EINST-Mitglieder).

I see you're using 1.0b7, so I can't chalk your problems up to an old
release ;-)

    DD> 1 - I did a bulk subscribe for approx. 100 members via the
    DD>     HTML interface. I overlooked a bogus line when pasting
    DD>     the addresses into the textfield and Mailman generated
    DD>     a strange entry. A syntax check on the mail addresses
    DD>     would be helpful. [The bogus address had a pending
    DD>     closing paranthesis: "AUser@somewhere.com)" ]

I've added more checks on the email address for the next release.  You 
should not be able to subscribe any address that starts with a -, has
any of []<>()|; in the address, or be unqualified (i.e. local; have no 
`@' in the string).

    DD> 2 - The abovementioned list of email addresses did contain
    DD>     mixed-case entries like "Detlev.Droege@uni-koblenz.de".
    DD> Mailman did lowercase them in most places, but not in all
    DD> places.

To be RFC compliant, Mailman case-preserves the username portion of
the email address for sending email.  Almost everywhere else, the
email address should just be lower cased.  You found one place that we 
missed.  This will be fixed in the next release.

    DD> 3 - When the first external member submitted an article, its
    DD>     From: address differed from the subscribed address, so I as
    DD>     the list admin was asked to approve the message. I did so,
    DD>     however the message was never sent out to the list members.
    DD>     It appears in the "post" logfile, it is archived in the
    DD>     HTML archive, but it was never mailed to the list members.
    DD>     Our postmaster could not detect any failure of our mail
    DD>     system nor any error messages. Is it possible Mailman
    DD>     just forgot to send it out ?

Sure, anything's possible, but I haven't been able to reproduce this
problem.  I set up a list that does not require admin approval, but
does restrict postings to members.  Then I sent a message with a
non-member From: line, and went through approval Web page.  The
message got posted to the list.  I'll need some help, or more
information, to help debug this.

    DD> 4 - As list admin I'd like to have an interface to change
    DD>     the mail address of list members. I allready got several
    DD>     requests to do so. It's a little boring to do so by
    DD>     unsubscribing the old and then subscribing the new address.
    DD>     Moreover, this generates a useles "Good Bye" and "Welcome"
    DD>     message which might confuse the subscriber.

This is definitely on the list, but it requires some architectural
changes to Mailman, so we're putting anything like this off for a
while.  One thing we though might not be too hard would be the ability 
to `clone' a user to a new address.  You'd still have to remove the
old address, but at least you wouldn't have to go and reset all their
options.  Still, I don't think we'll do this for 1.0, but perhaps for
1.1.

    DD> Anyway - Mailman is a great tool and I like it a lot !
    DD> Don't take this as complaint, but as my (very) small effort
    DD> to make it even better.

And we appreciate it!  Hopefully we can get more information and
figure out what's going on with #3 above.

Thanks,
-Barry