[Mailman-Developers] Splitting -owner and -admin handling

[Dan Mick]

I like 2) better, as anything that helps bounce processing be
more efficient is a big win for low-end machines, especially if
it can avoid the relatively-huge Python startup time.

> Mail destined for the -owner and -admin addresses for a list are
> handled differently because -admin mail flows through the bounce
> detector, and only if that fails is it forwarded on to the list
> owners.  Mail for -owner goes directly to the list owners.
> 
> For historical reasons, Mailman conflates these two addresses by
> having the same script (mailowner) deal with both.  In MM2.0.5, I
> parsed the incoming message to see if it was destined for -admin or
> -owner, and I added an appropriate bit message metadata before queuing
> the message.
> 
> In MM2.1, I don't parse the message in mailowner.  This has the
> advantage of reducing the amount of time the MTA program has to
> consume, which I think is a good thing.  The problem is that the
> determination of -owner vs. -admin doesn't happen until the qrunner
> processes the message.  If I want to split bounce processing into a
> separate queue, the best place to do this is as early as possible,
> i.e. in the MTA program script.
> 
> There are two options:
> 
> 1) Parse the message in mailowner, or at the very least, look for the
>    To: field to see if it was destined for -owner or -admin, and then
>    put the message in the proper queue.  We can mitigate the parsing
>    costs by storing the message as a pickle instead of plain text, so
>    the qrunner slurping messages out of the queue doesn't need to
>    reparse it.  Pros: backwards compatibility with existing alias
>    files.  Cons: mailowner has to do more work, has a higher
>    opportunity for uncaught exceptions (exposed as MTA bounces), and
>    can be fooled by Bcc's.
> 
> 2) Add a new script, maybe called `mailadmin' which gets associated
>    only with -admin messages.  The mailowner script would thus only
>    accept messages for -owner.  Pros: keeps things simple, and splits
>    bounce processing into a separate queue early on, with minimal
>    chance of problems.  Cons: breaks backwards compatibility with
>    existing alias files, since they'd have to be changed to point the
>    -admin addresses at mailadmin instead of what they currently point
>    to (mailowner).  Mitigate this with the auto-alias-file
>    regeneration scripts already in Mailman (i.e. bin/genaliases).
> 
> Thoughts?  Preferences?  Other suggestions?
> 
> -Barry
> 
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