[Mailman-Developers] 2.1.8 documentation mismatch

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 7 June 2006 23:32:01 -0500 Brad Knowles <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org> 
wrote:

> At 2:35 PM -0400 2006-06-07, Barry Warsaw wrote:
>
>>  Totally agree.  OTOH, don't most MTAs provide /some/ way to call
>>  external programs on messages at various points in their workflow?
>
> 	Sendmail has milter, and that has now been brought into postfix (as of
> 2.3), but I can't speak for any other MTAs.  What would need to happen
> would be a custom program would have to be written for each MTA to
> interact with it in the way that MTA works, but which has a deep
> understanding of Mailman and the configuration for each list and
> recipient, and could effectively do a "dry run" for each message.

No, that's not true. What's required is that Mailman provide a simple API 
to allow MTA developers to ask Mailman whether a particular sender is 
permitted to post to the list. Holding rosters (a v3 proposal) in open 
databases would solve this problem - at least for Exim.

Although Mailman is capable of filtering on other factors, I don't think 
the number of cases is significant. However, it might be possible to extend 
the API to provide information on other list policies.

> 	Of course, this would have to happen after the anti-spam/anti-virus
> milters, and then some sites are going to use accept & scan techniques as
> opposed to milter, so there may need to be multiple different "MTA
> adapters", even for a particular MTA.

If an MTA is doing accept and scan, then none of this is relevant. If the 
MTA doesn't query Mailman BEFORE accepting the message, then there's never 
any point in doing it at all.

-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex