[Mailman-Users] Diagnosing command failures

[Mark Sapiro]

On 01/20/2015 06:59 PM, Gary Merrill wrote:
> I was really asking whether there is a way to diagnose command
> failures in Mailman, and it's clear at this point that the answer is "No."
> This isn't entirely unexpected, but I just wanted to check in case there
> happened to be something that I'd missed.


It depends. The user who sends an email command is provided with a
response that tells him what's wrong.

We try to provide diagnostic information that is helpful to the user.
The problem here is we don't anticipate a third party acting at a
distance and unable to get reliable information from his user.


> A "diagnosis" of
> 
>> Error
>> LISTNAME roster authentication failed.


What more would you like to see? Presumably the user knows what he
provided for his email address and password and the response says one or
both is invalid. If the roster is not public, we can't give more
information because if we tell you that it is the password that's
invalid or the email address, this information can be used to fish for
list membership and this is not public information.

You could set Privacy options... -> Subscription rules -> private_roster
(aka Who can view subscription list?) to Anyone and that would simplify
your user's task, but you may not want a public roster.


> Personal consultation and observation appears to be the only approach here
> that will be successful.


As I said,

>> I can give you patches to log everything if that's what you want

Let me know.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan