[Mailman-Developers] PHP Wrappers?

[John W. Baxter]

On 11/22/05 12:18 AM, "Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Speaking for myself, I see nothing wrong with asking the bleeding edge
> adopters to change MTAs, and I see nothing wrong with restricting
> Mailman-supplied MTA code to a couple of MTAs that we "like".  Of
> course we help other MTAs to incorporate the feature, but we don't
> need to promise that they can use it in advance.  Some MTAs may never
> get it.

None of what I'm about to say is meant to imply that the idea being
discussed is bad.  Because I don't think it is a bad idea.


You're ideas are workable, but not--easily--here.  Mail from the world and
from customers arrives (into different Exim instances) on machine 1 (which
is multiple machines in practice); the mail for mailing list addresses is
then sent to the machine running mailman (machine 2).  Machine 1 does not
run a web server, and is unlikely ever to do so (mail storage and retrieval
being over on machine 3, where web servers run for webmail only).

We don't (now, but could) do a recipient-verification callout from machine 1
to machine 2 for mail coming from the world (*), but only the addressing
would be available, not whatever content-based rejection is desired in the
Mailman configuration.  (We also could let the world talk directly to the
Mailman machine, at the cost of duplicating our greylisting (which keeps
most spam and many viruses out of Mailman) and virus filtering and
supplementary spam filtering on that machine.  We'd have to see a major
benefit to do that.

* Also, unless one's collection of local users uses non-majority MUAs (any
MUA other than Outlook and Outlook Express is statistically insignificant in
the general market), it's not a good idea to reject at SMTP time for
submissions from one's own users, because the MUAs do such a rotten job of
informing the user about the error.  (Further, some send pending messages
before retrieving, so the ISP gets support calls about "I can't get my mail"
when the problem is that they are trying to send a message with a bogus
address and don't realize that the odd little thing down in the corner is
trying to tell them that.

So, at the MTA end, it's likely that for all-purpose ISPs, only some
incoming email bound for Mailman will be checked at SMTP time (so Mailman
will continue to have to check as it does now).  Non-connectivity Mailman
host operations--unless they accept message submission directly from
MUAs--won't have that problem.