[Mailman-Developers] Mailman and Submission port

[Barry Warsaw]

On Nov 29, 2009, at 4:30 AM, Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:

> What would we have to do, to make port 587 the default port? In  
> section 4 the
> RFC says, a MSA MUST do all of the following:
>
> 1. General Submission Rejection Code
> 2. Ensure All Domains Are Fully-Qualified
> 3. Require Authentication
>
> To cut it short: 1. and 2. are trivial (at least in Postfix and I  
> don't know
> the others MTAs well enough to tell for them too). 3. requires to  
> add SMTP AUTH
> functionality to Mailman's SMTP client.
>
>
> How should we implement SMTP AUTH in the MM SMTP client?
>
> I propose for a start plaintext (PLAIN, LOGIN) and shared-secret  
> mechanisms
> (CRAM-MD5, DIGEST-MD5) should be added to the SMTP client. Those are  
> the ones
> used most widely in every day SMTP AUTH.
>
> Later implementations could add GSSAPI and EXTERNAL. If plaintext  
> mechanisms
> are added we should also consider to add STARTTLS functionality to  
> MM's SMTP
> client to shield credentials while they are sent in a plaintext  
> authentication
> session.

Should we decide to do this, changing the port number is easy.   
There's already a configuration variable for this (currently set of  
course to 25).

As for implementing SMTP AUTH, we are limited by what Python's smtplib  
supports.  From a cursory inspection of the module in Python 2.6, it  
looks like it supports PLAIN, LOGIN, and CRAM-MD5.  That may mean that  
the only thing we need to add to Mailman is plumbing for setting the  
user name and password in the config file.

Please open a bug on the Mailman project in Launchpad for this.

-Barry

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