[Mailman-Developers] Re: Initial Mailman v2.0 with TMDA and Mime filtering

[J C Lawrence]

On Wed, 31 Jul 2002 11:33:02 -0600 
Jason R Mastaler <jason@mastaler.com> wrote:

> J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> writes:
>> I built the system with Mailman 2.0, TMDA 0.58, Exim v3, mimefilter,
>> mimedecode, and procmail.

> * It's too Exim specific.  Exim is used less than Sendmail, Postfix or
> qmail.  It would be nice to come up with a more general HOWTO that
> covers integration with either Sendmail, Postfix or Exim.

Given that the alias filter has to execute as a specific effective
UID/GID any HOW-TO is necessarily going to be MTA specific.  There is no
agreement or common standard among MTAs for configuring that.  

  NOTE: IF TMDA were integrated with Mailman directly (eg plugin) this
  problem would be obviated.  TMDA would be run by the Mailman processes
  which are already configured under the MTA to run as the appropriate
  UID.  As such a very large portion of the problem and complexity
  automatically goes away at that point.

  Ditto with MIME filters and other post and pre-processing being
  plugins into the queue structure of Mailman v2.1.

The attraction of Exim in this regard is that it makes such
configuration both easy and very obvious/transparent, and you don't need
to maintain any per-list configurations (such as an alias file).

> * The mimefilter/mimedecode stuff is a distraction IMO, and not really
> relevant to the TMDA integration.

True, but its a common question and desire.  MIME or other message
filtering is a common question on -users, coming very close in with
"wanted GID" and "how do I do an announcement list".  

Integrating TMDA really isn't that hard a question or problem.  I was
interested in integrating TMDA in a fashion that also leant itself to
integrating other useful tools, rather than making such further
extensions difficult.  As such I tried to build a framework more than a
single point solution.

> * If we can find a way to do this without procmail, that's a bonus.

That would be fairly easy under Exim -- you can do all the extra work
between the director and transport.

> That said, thanks for writing this up.  I think it's a good start, and
> longer overdue.

<bow>

>> Getting the filter process to execute as 'list' under postfix proved
>> a bitch.

> What user is the filter process executed as by default?

nobody.nogroup.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.