[Mailman-Users] Updated view on Sendmail integration

[Jim Ziobro]

I am still fairly new to Mailman but I have been a long time Sendmail 
user.I like to know how things work.Partly out of security paranoia and 
partly out of curiosity I started hacking around the MTA interface.

One of the things I now see is that Mailman depends on a group for 
access(vs. setuid).Sendmail does not like group accessible things files 
or directories based on a long history of security problems.Somewhere 
there has to be a bridge between the Mailman security model and Sendmail 
(or any other MTA).

Back in 2004 the approach was to create a shell scriptThat script would 
get executed as root.More on that later.

Another approach was mm-handler.Mm-handler handles the security bridge 
by calling back Mailman after it has switched to UID/GID: 
mailman/mailman.An elegant solution.The v3 version 
<http://sw.ziobro.info/mm-handler/>optionally allows mail not destined 
for a mailing list to be delivered locally.Thus mm-handler could be used 
to implement mailing lists in front of an existing mail domain.It looks 
like the mm-handler could be integrated into Postfix and probably other 
MTAs.I suspect passing all mail through mm-handler would be a 
performance drag for a busy mail system.It looks like leaving MTA set to 
‘Manual’ is best but that generates a little irrelevant text.

If you want to mix Mailman mailing lists in with your regular mailboxes 
and aliases then the classic method of using the aliases file as 
generated by Mailman seems best.The 2004 instructions suggested using a 
shell script to copy the Mailman generated aliases file into /etc/mail/ 
configuration directory for Sendmail.See: 
https://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2004-June/037518.html

Current distributions of Sendmail contain a file /etc/mail/make which is 
an appropriate place for such customization.The /etc/mail/make script 
gets executed every time Sendmail restarts.It is called once as “make 
aliases” and again as just “make” before Sendmail restarts.Instead of 
creating a shell script you could just edit the /etc/mail/make file so 
the makealiasesdb function reads:

makealiasesdb() {
/usr/bin/cp /etc/mailman/aliases /etc/mail/mailman-aliases/usr/bin/newaliases > /dev/null
}

I started wondering where the interface between Mailman and MTA should 
be defined.For example if I am using MTA=’Manual’ then I could setup my 
/etc/mail/make as:

makealiasesdb() {

/usr/lib/mailman/bin/genaliases > /etc/mail/mailman-aliases

/usr/bin/newaliases > /dev/null

}


But the ‘Manual’ mailer has no capability of signaling the MTA that the 
mailing lists have been updated.If I use MTA=’Postfix’ then genaliases 
has no output.Apparently the genaliases program is a function of the MTA 
setting.So I rolled my own aliases with a perl program:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# create the Mailman aliases file

open(A,"/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_lists -b|") ||

exit(1);
my @e= qw(admin bounces confirm join leave owner request subscribe unsubscribe);

while(<A>){
chop;

print "$_:\"|mailman post $_\"\n";

foreach my $x (@e){
print "$_-$x:\"|mailman $x $_\"\n";
}

print "owner-$_:$_-owner\n"; # Majordomo fans

}

The perl program can be stuffed into one line in the make shell script 
like this:

makealiasesdb() {

# genaliasesinto /etc/mail/mailman-aliases

/usr/bin/perl -e ' open(A,"/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list_lists -b|") || 
exit(1); my @e=qw(admin bounces confirm join leave owner request 
subscribe unsubscribe); while(<A>){ chop; print "$_:\"|mailman post 
$_\"\n"; foreach my $x (@e){ print "$_-$x:\"|mailman $x $_\"\n"; } print 
"owner-$_:$_-owner\n"; }' > /etc/mail/mailman-aliases

/usr/bin/newaliases > /dev/null }

Once the need for genaliases is gone I could simplify the 
MTA/Sendmail.py create function to:

def create(mlist, cgi=False, nolock=False, quiet=False):

# restart the mail program so new aliases are active

msg = 'command failed: %s (status: %s, %s)'

if not nolock:# NOT genaliases

acmd = mm_cfg.RESTART_MAILER_CMDstatus = (os.system(acmd) >> 8) & 0xffif status:errstr = os.strerror(status)syslog('error', msg, acmd, status, errstr)raise RuntimeError, msg % (acmd, status, errstr)


The RESTART_MAILER_CMD configuration will Default to:
RESTART_MAILER_CMD = ‘sudo systemctl restart sendmail’

On older systems it might be: ‘sudo /etc/init.d/sendmail restart’

By moving the responsibility to create aliases out of Mailman the 
Mailman code base shrinks a lot.Smaller is better.It works for me.

Is the directory “/etc/mailman” group-writable only to support the 
creation of an aliases file?I would feel more confident if /etc/mailman 
was only writable by root.

This is where I am now.I cut and paste Python code but don’t necessarily 
understand it.If someone could give the Python code a look over then 
I’ll organize it a little better for a release.

This got a little long.  Thanks for your attention!

Ciao,

//Z\\
Jim Ziobro