[Mailman-Users] change links in mail footer to https

[Mark Sapiro]

On 12/10/2017 10:17 AM, Mike Starr wrote:
> 
> Of course, having monitored this list for several years, I'm totally
> impressed with the skill and knowledge of Mark Sapiro and others, and I
> do understand that Mailman is an open-source program for which (to the
> best of my knowledge) nobody gets paid to maintain.


Thank you.

And you are correct that no one is paid to maintain Mailman (in the
interest of full disclosure, that may change in a small way for a short
time for one Mailman 3 developer). Also, for the last several years, I
am the only one doing maintenance on Mailman 2.1. I have had a few
contributions from the community which I greatly appreciate, but I am
it, and I too would rather spend all my time on Mailman 3, but I'm still
not (quite) ready to throw Mailman 2.1 support under the bus. There are
still too many users.


>> But it would
>> certainly be nice is the Mailman UI could be improved to allow users to
>> accomplish many of the things they seek help for here without having to
>> spend weeks learning how to do python programming or shell script
>> execution.


If this had been a well thought out feature request even 5 years ago, I
might have done it, and even now, a complete merge proposal might be
accepted, but at this point, I'm not interested in doing this from
scratch. See below for more.


On 12/10/2017 12:19 PM, Brian Carpenter wrote:
> 
> Well let's not give all hosting providers a black eye. We run all kinds of admin tasks on behalf of our mailman clients. As for using SSL, it is time consuming moving a large number of lists on various domains to use SSL. We run our mailman lists on cPanel servers with the default http setup. Since there is a growing demand for SSL connections we are moving our clients to use SSL. We already offer free SSL certificates so this move fits quite well with that.


And Brian's is definitely one of the "very conscientious and
cooperative" cPanel Mailman hosting services I had in mind in my post at
<https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2017-December/082803.html>.


> The problem with shell access and mailman, is that mailman server changes requires root access and what ever changes are made to the mailman server itself impacts all mailing lists. So those of you who use mailman on a shared hosting environment should never be given shell access to mailman. 


And this is a real problem and one that I think should be addressed by
cPanel, not me.

The Mailman developers see Mailman as software that requires server
admin access to install and configure. cPanel changes that at some level
so they should go all the way and give the end user the ability through
the control panel to make the changes in a way that doesn't affect other
users on a shared host. I had a conversation several years ago at PyCon
about access to Mailman's logs in some way that could allow a cPanel
domain admin to access only log info for their domain, but that didn't
get anywhere.

The Mailman development team has also had contact with cPanel, and
cPanel is interested in Mailman remaining viable and in offering Mailman
3, and they do support us by providing the server that supports our CI
environment in GitLab where we develop Mailman 3, and we are very
appreciative of that. They are, however, only able to provide money or
hardware resources, not actual development.

Note that with this specific issue, I could expose a list's web_page_url
in the web admin UI, but that wouldn't solve the problem. As Brian
indicates, making Mailman use https involve more than that. It also
requires certificates and web server configuration, and while I don't
know, I suspect these things require a server admin, even on cPanel.

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