[Mailman-Users] Mailman - a few questions

[Bill Catambay]

At 1:41 AM +0900 on 8/14/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:


>  > >This can be done by setting up aliases as follows (pseudo-syntax, your
>  > >mileage will vary):
>  > >
>  > >foo-list:           moderator at example.com
>  > >foo-list-moderated: | mailman post foo-list
>  > >
>  > >That requires modifying the mailman aliases in the MTA manually,
>  > >though.
>  >
>  > This went over my head.  What does "MTA manually" mean?   Does that
>  > mean it cannot be done with the web interface?   Do I need to contact
>  > my ISP, or is there something I can do using my shell account access?
>
>Working with the mail transfer agent (MTA == Postfix IIRC) cannot be
>done through Mailman's web interface.  [If you have something like
>cPanel it might be possible.]  To change aliases in the MTA you would
>need not just shell access, but root access.  You may need help from
>your ISP in that case.

It does sound like something requiring my ISP involvement.  I'm sure 
they won't mind if it's a one-time setup and they understand what I'm 
requesting.  The thing is that I don't really understand what I'd be 
requesting, or why.

foo-list is the name of my mailing list, and moderator at example.com 
would be the moderator's email (aka, my email address).  I'm asking 
them to create an alias for the list name?  Or should that be the 
full list email address (e.g., foo-list at lists.sonic.net) ?

What is "foo-list-moderated"?  I'm guessing "| mailman post foo-list" 
is some command line syntax that any server running Mailman would 
understand.  I can pretend to understand that (since my ISP tech 
support will probably understand it).

This suggestion was in response to my leading paragraph, not any of 
my 4 issues,so I'm not really sure what this buys if I were to get my 
ISP to do it.  Was this a suggestion for how to do the redirection? 
(in which case, I'm already good, as I already use my email client 
for redirection)

>
>  > It seems that if you change the reply-to to an explicit address, that
>  > both digest and non-digest members should have the same reply-to.
>
>Sounds plausible but these things are complex.  As I say, somebody
>more familiar with the detail needs to answer this one.

Maybe there was an assumption made that people generally don't click 
reply to a digest (since the subject would be wrong, and the quoted 
text would be excessive).  It does happen.  For some, it's easier to 
click reply and change the subject and then trim the quoted text 
(there are a few times when they forget to do the subject change 
and/or trimming, but those would be rejected anyway).

>
>All of these approaches suffer from the possibility that your
>moderation password could theoretically be "sniffed" on the net unless
>your moderator uses an encrypted channel to send mail to the list
>host.  The "Moderator is Enveloper Sender" approach is also
>vulnerable, since it is easy (if you have the right tools such as a
>Linux workstation, or certain "unofficial" MUAs) to spoof the envelope
>sender.  I don't want to alarm you, just to give you some information
>you need to compare these approaches.

I tried this once, and I felt really really uncomfortable with it.  I 
kept looking at the To: to make sure I wasn't sending it to someone. 
The admin email says to click reply, but when I click reply, it 
addresses it to the list owner (e.g., 
foo-list-owner at lists.sonic.net), so it just comes back to me.  I'm 
not sure where it was supposed to go, but I'm also not sure I would 
feel comfortable with this method anyway.  I can picture me doing 
this some night when I'm running on 2 brain cells, and sending the 
list password to some random email.

>  > >  > 4. Lastly, the web archives created by Autoshare automatically
>  > >  > created clickable HTML links for all HTML URL's in posts.
>  > >
>  > >I don't think Pipermail (the default archiver bundled with Mailman)
>  > >can do it at all,
>  >
>  > Interestingly, the archives for *this* mailing list appears to have
>  > some decent formatted archives.  Does this list use MHonArc?
>
>Apparently I was totally wrong.  I thought Pipermail only did that for
>its own links (next message, etc), but it does seem to do it for all
>URLs.  In particular, this list does use pipermail.

Okay, this is bizarre. I just went to our web archives, and they now 
have the formatted "previous" and "next" links, as well as HTML links 
within the body.  I swear the other day I was staring at plain text. 
The footer has changed to "This archive was generated by Pipermail 
0.09 (Mailman edition)."  I looked at the footer before, and it was 
completely different (no mention of Pipermail).

[looks again]

Okay, I think I know what happened.  I clicked on the "Gzip'd Text" 
link, and when you do that, it shows the archives in plain text.  It 
seems kind of obvious now.  I guess that was one of those nights I 
was running on minimum brain cells.

Bill