[Mailman-Developers] before next release: disable backscatterin default installation

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 27 March 2008 08:56:54 +0900 "Stephen J. Turnbull" 
<stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:

> Ian Eiloart writes:
>
>  > No, that's not true. I have about 10,000 users here.
>
> Interesting.  I bet we're talking hundreds of thousands of users, just
> with the three or four of you medium-to-large-site admins that have
> posted so far.  At a penny per user, I'm sure you could find somebody
> to do this work.  I know I would do it (but you surely could find
> somebody cheaper and better-qualified ;-).

At a penny per user, I could raise £100. That wouldn't do the job. 
Unfortunately, UK academic institutions are cash strapped. We (Sussex) have 
contributed to UoW and Cyrus IMAP servers code, and to some other projects. 
Cambridge (somewhat less cash strapped) contributed almost all of the Exim 
MTA.


>  > > decentralized.  It is designed to allow load-sharing by use of
>  > > intermediate and/or secondary MXes to handle primary crashes or
>  > > overloads.
>  >
>  > Yes, but they need to have equal access to user databases.
>
> I ask, where are these requirements written?

You mean the requirement that the mail system be able to reject email from 
non-members at SMTP time?

<http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+3.0> under "spam defenses". Third 
paragraph. It was there on July 21 last year, when the page was created 
from the Mailman 2.2 wish list.

>  I've been reading the
> Mailman lists for years.  I know that you guys want the autoresponders
> configurable.  However, often enough they've been presented as YAGNI,

Er. I guess that depends on what you mean by "need". Clearly nobody has 
died because we haven't got this feature. However, very many people have 
been inconvenienced. It's possible that Mailman bounces contributed to our 
site being blacklisted by AOL and Yahoo for short periods. It's certain 
that I've had to spend time helping list managers understand how to choose 
between the inadequate choices that they have for bad lists.

> not a bug, and this is the first time I've heard a demand that they be
> shut off by default.  Obviously you guys hang out together in some Big
> Site Cabal,

No... I spend more time on the Exim mailing list, but all the conversations 
that I've ever had about Mailman are on this list.

If you read the thread carefully, you'll find that my position is that this 
feature is a requirement, but not for 2.1, and maybe not even for 2.2. I 
just want it to happen eventually.

> but what is common knowledge to you is not necessarily
> something that volunteer part-time developers are going to have easy
> access to.

That's why I post to the list.

> BTW, that's not how I understand a secondary as a practical matter.
> Effectively, that is a distributed primary.

Yes. When I said the architecture is broken I meant the entire concept of 
the secondary. It's best to have a distributed primary, and not hard to 
implement with LDAP. Failing that, you have to choose between relying on 
third parties to queue your mail for later delivery or on queuing tons of 
spam on your secondary. I'd prefer to simply not have a secondary if it 
can't be of equal quality to the primary.

> (I bet your "secondary"
> MXes deliver directly to user mailboxes, which are a shared resource
> like the user database.  No?)  Among other things, for most small-
> scale operations, the user database lives on the same host as the
> primary's MTA.  If it is down, then under that requirement so are any
> secondaries.
>



-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex
x3148