[Mailman-Developers] Incoming patch to fix a few Mailman bugs

[Nigel Metheringham]

Comments on a couple of these issues...

foner@media.mit.edu said:
> Bugs #1 and #2 still look reasonably critical to me but are the ones
> I'm least likely to be fixing, since they may require more familiarity
> with the source than I'll have time to spend. 

[from earlier message...]
foner@media.mit.edu said:
> (1) Mailman doesn't send error reports to the right place.  Our setup
> here has individual workstations, such as foo.media.mit.edu,
> masquerade such that their mail headers are rewritten to appear to
> come from media.mit.edu (which forwards mail to our main mail-handling
> machine, and also has an MX pointing there).  This is usually how
> large sets of machines are set up everywhere.  But when I was trying
> to configure Mailman (with the wrong compiled-in GID [it wasn't clear
> to me whether it was the webserver's GID or sendmail's GID that was
> the right one], hence any request caused the wrapper to err), Mailman
> evidently went out of its way to attempt to send the error mail to the
> individual workstation, e.g., foo.media.mit.edu, and -not- to
> media.mit.edu, which is what the From: address in the incoming mail to
> Mailman specified and which should be respected in any event---From:
> should -always- take precedence over some attempt to divine a better
> address.  After all, Mailman cannot possibly have a better idea of
> which machine is handling mail for the sender than the sender itself
> does.  (This meant, btw, that the error mail simply got wedged in the
> sendmail queue of the machine I'm running Mailman on, since individual
> workstations here don't listen to SMTP requests.) 

No no no a thousand time no!
Error reports must always (thats always) be sent to the envelope 
sender.  If your systems send out mail with a broken envelope sender 
that is *your* problem and not mailman's.  [That error mail is also 
being generated by the MTA not mailman].

If your machines do not accept SMTP to machine name, and machine name 
does not have an MX to somewhere that handles mail for machine name, 
then your mail config is terminally broken and should be barred from 
the net.


foner@media.mit.edu said:
> (4) Feature request:  Mailman should support a --with-default-url as a
> build argument so it can use cnames and/or virtual hosts.  Ditto for
> the FQDN of the host.  I had to go in and screw around with various
> options files to get this set up correctly after Mailman guessed; why
> make the user edit this instead of taking it as an arg?  (Yes, I know
> you can change it one list at a time in the admin web interface, but
> the default should be right, too.) 

Config is best done by configuration and not by hardcoding to a build.  
Most people will end up installing this as a package, ie rpm.


foner@media.mit.edu said:
> (6) Should I be creating mailman-owner or owner-mailman as aliases?
> The doc is inconsistent, so I did both.  Is this specific to the MTA?
> If so, you should figure it out and document it for common ones.  (I'm
> using sendmail 8.9.3.) 

mailman (and listname) -owner is what mailman uses.  sendmail from 
memory has some magic related to owner-<name> related to some oddity in 
list handling.  Personally I intercept both in my MTA rules.

	Nigel.
-- 
[ - Opinions expressed are personal and may not be shared by VData - ]
[ Nigel Metheringham                  Nigel.Metheringham@VData.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]