Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System Copyright (C) 1998-2003 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA Here is a history of user visible changes to Mailman. 2.1.2 (22-Apr-2003) - New languages Portuguese (Portugal) and Polish. - Many convenient constants have been added to the Defaults.py module to (hopefully) make it more readable. - Email addresses which contain 8-bit characters in them are now rejected and won't be subscribed. This is not the same as 8-bit characters in the realname, which is still allowed. - The X-Originating-Email header is removed for anonymous lists. Hotmail apparently adds this header. - When running make to build Mailman, you can specify $DESTDIR to the install target to specify an alternative location for installation, without influencing the paths stored in e.g. Defaults.py. This is useful to package managers. - New Defaults.py variable DELIVERY_RETRY_WAIT which controls how long the outgoing qrunner will wait before it retries a tempfailure delivery. - The semantics for the extend.py hook to MailList objects has changed slightly. The hook is now called before attempting to lock and load the database. - Mailman now uses the email package version 2.5.1 - bin/transcheck now checks for double-%'s - bin/genaliases grew a -q / --quiet flag - cron/checkdbs grew a -h / --help option. - The -c / --change-msg option has been removed from bin/add_members - bin/msgfmt.py has been added, taken from Python 2.3's Tools/i18n directory. The various .mo files are now no longer distributed with Mailman. They are generated at build time instead. - A new file misc/sitelist.cfg which can be used with bin/config_list provides a small number of recommended settings for your site list. Be sure to read it over before applying! sitelist.cfg is installed into the data directory. - Many bug fixes, including these SourceForge bugs closed and patches applied: 677668, 690448, 700538, 700537, 673294, 683906, 671294, 522080, 521124, 534297, 699900, 697321, 695526, 703941, 658261, 710678, 707608, 671303, 717096, 694912, 707624, 716755, 661138, 716754, 716702, 667167, 725369, 726415 2.1.1 (08-Feb-2003) Lots of bug fixes and language updates. Also: - Closed a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the user options page. - Restore the ability to control which headers show up in messages included in plaintext and MIME digests. See the variables PLAIN_DIGEST_KEEP_HEADERS and MIME_DIGEST_KEEP_HEADERS in Defaults.py. - Messages included in the plaintext digests are now sent through the scrubber to remove (and archive) attachments. Otherwise, attachments would screw up plaintext digests. MIME digests include the attachments inline. 2.1 final (30-Dec-2002) Last minute bug fixes and language updates. 2.1 rc 1 (24-Dec-2002) Bug fixes and language updates. Also, - Lithuanian support has been added. - bin/remove_members grew --nouserack and --noadminack switches - configure now honors --srcdir 2.1 beta 6 (09-Dec-2002) Lots and lots of bug fixes, and translation updates. Also, - ARCHIVER_OBSCURES_EMAILADDRS is now set to true by default. - QRUNNER_SAVE_BAD_MESSAGES is now set to true by default. - Bounce messages which were recognized, but in which no member addresses were found are no longer forwarded to the list administrator. - bin/arch grew a --wipe option which first removes the entire old archive before regenerating the new one. - bin/mailmanctl -u now prints a warning that permission problems could appear, such as when trying to delete a list through the web that has some archives in it. - bin/remove_members grew --nouserack/-n and -noadminack/-N options. - A new script bin/list_owners has been added for printing out list owners and moderators. - Dates in the web version of archived messages are now relative to the local timezone, and include the timezone names, when available. 2.1 beta 5 (19-Nov-2002) As is typical for a late beta release, this one includes the usual bug fixes, tweaks, and massive new features (just kidding). IMPORTANT: If you are using Pipermail, and you have any archives that were created or added to in 2.1b4, you will need to run bin/b4b5-archfix, followed by bin/check_perms to fix some serious performance problems. From you install directory, run "bin/b4b5-archfix --help" for details. - The personalization options have been tweaked to provide more control over mail header and decoration personalizations. In 2.1b4, when personalization was enabled, the To and Cc headers were always overwritten. But that's usually not appropriate for anything but announce lists, so now these headers aren't changed unless "Full personalization" is enabled. - You now need to go to the General category to enable emergency moderation. - The order of the hold modules in the GLOBAL_PIPELINE has changed, again. Now Moderate comes before Hold. - Estonian language support has been added. - All posted messages should now get decorated with headers and footers in a MIME-safe way. Previously, some MIME type messages didn't get decorated at all. - bin/arch grew a -q/--quiet option - bin/list_lists grew a -b/--bare option 2.1 beta 4 (26-Oct-2002) The usual assortment of bug fixes and language updates, some u/i tweaks, as well as the following: - Configuring / building / installing o Tightened up some configure checks; it will now bark loudly if you don't have the Python distutils package available (some Linux distros only include distutils in their "devel" packages). o Mailman's username/group security assertions are now done by symbolic name instead of numeric id. This provides a level of indirection that makes it much easier to move or package Mailman. --with-mail-gid and --with-cgi-gid are retained, but they control the group names used instead. - Command line scripts o A new script, bin/transcheck that language teams can use to check their .po files. o bin/list_members grew a --fullnames/-f option to print the full names along with the addresses. o cron/senddigests grew --help/-h and --listname/-l options. o bin/fix_url.py grew some command line options to support moving a list to a specific virtual domain. - Pipermail / archiving o Reworked the directory layout for archive attachments to be less susceptible to inode overload. Attachments are now placed in archives/private//attachments// o Internationalization support in the archiver has been improved. - Internationalization o New languages: Swedish. - Mail handling o Content filtering now has a pass_mime_type variable, which is a whitelist of MIME types to allow in postings. See the details of the variable in the Content Filtering category for more information. o If a member has enabled their DontReceiveDuplicates option, we'll also strip their addresses from the Cc headers in the copy of the message sent to the list. This helps keep the Cc lines from growing astronomically. o Bounce messages are now forwarded to the list administrators both if they are unrecognized, and if no list member's address could be extracted. o Content filtering now has a filter_action variable which controls what happens when a message matches the content filter rules. The default is still to discard the message. o When searching for an Approve/Approved header, the first non-whitespace line of the body of the message is also checked, if the body has a MIME type of text/plain. o If a list is personalized, and the list's posting address is not included in a Reply-To header, the posting address is copied into a Cc header, otherwise there was no (easy) way a recipient could reply back to the list. o Added a MS Exchange bounce recognizer. o New configuration variable news_moderation which allows the mail->news gateway to properly post to moderated newsgroups. o Messages sent to a list's owners now comes from the site list to prevent mail loops when list owners or moderators having bouncing addresses. - Miscellaneous o mailanctl prevents runaway restarts by imposing a maximum restart value (defaulting to 10) for restarting the qrunners. If you hit this limit, do "mailmanctl stop" followed by "mailmanctl start". o The Membership Management page's search feature now includes searching on members real names. o The start of a manual for list administrators is given in Python HOWTO format (LaTeX). It's in doc/mailman-admin.tex but it still needs lots of fleshing out. o More protections against creating a list with an invalid name. 2.1 beta 3 (09-Aug-2002) The usual assortment of bug fixes and language updates. - New languages: Dutch, Portuguese (Brazil) - New configure script options: --with-mailhost, --with-urlhost, --without-permcheck. See ./configure --help for details. - The encoding of Subject: prefixes is controlled by a new list option encode_ascii_prefixes. This is useful for languages with character sets other than us-ascii. See the Languages admin page for details. - A new list option news_prefix_subject_too controls whether postings gated from mail to news should have the subject prefix added to their Subject: header. - The algorithm for upgrading the moderation controls for a Mailman 2.0.x list has changed. The change should be transparent, but you'll want to double check the moderation controls after upgrading from MM2.0.x. This should have no effect for upgrades from a previous MM2.1 beta. See the UPGRADING file for details. - On the Mass Subscribe admin page, a text box has been added so that the admin can add a custom message to be prepended to the welcome/invite notification. - On the admindb page, a link is included to more easily reload the page. - The Sendmail.py delivery module is sabotaged so that it can't be used naively. You need to read the comments in the file and edit the code to use this unsafe module. - When a member sends a `help' command to the request address, the url to their options page is included in the response. - Autoresponses, -request command responses, and posting hold notifications are inhibited for any message that has a Precedence: {bulk|list|junk} header. This is to avoid mail loops between email 'bots. If the original message has an X-Ack: yes header, the response is sent. Responses are also limited to a maximum number per day, as defined in the site variable MAX_AUTORESPONSES_PER_DAY. This is another guard against 'bot loops, and it defaults to 10. - When a Reply-To: header is munged to include both the original and the list address, the list address is always added last. - The cron/mailpasswds script has grown a -l/--listname option. - The cron/disabled script has grown options to send out notifications for reasons other than bounce-disabled. It has also grown a -f/--force option. See cron/disabled --help for details. - The bin/dumpdb script has grown a -n/--noprint option. - An experimental new mechanism for processing incoming messages has been added. If you can configure your MTA to do qmail-style Maildir delivery, Mailman now has a MaildirRunner qrunner. This may turn out to be much more efficient and scalable, but for MM2.1, it will not be officially supported. See Defaults.py.in and Mailman/Queue/MaildirRunner.py for details. 2.1 beta 2 (05-May-2002) Lots of bug fixing, and the following new features and changes: - A "de-mime" content filter feature has been added. This oft-requested feature allows you to specify MIME types that Mailman should strip off of any messages before they're posted to the list. You can also optionally convert text/html to text/plain (by default, through lynx if it's available). - Changes to the way the RFC 2919 and 2369 headers (i.e. the List-*: headers) are added: o List-Id: is always added o List-Post:, List-Help:, List-Subscribe:, List-Unsubscribe:, and List-Archive: are only added to posting messages. o X-List-Administrivia: is only added to messages Mailman creates and sends out of its own accord. Also, if the site administrator allows it, list owners can suppress the addition of all the List-*: headers. List owners can also separately suppress the List-Post: header for announce-only lists. - A new framework for email commands has been added. This allows you to easily add, delete, or change the email commands that Mailman understands, on a per-site, per-list, or even per-user basis. - Users can now change their digest delivery type from MIME to plain text globally, for all lists they are subscribed to. - No language select pulldowns are shown if the list only supports one language. - More mylist-admin eradication. - Several performance improvements in the bounce qrunner, one of which is to make it run only once per minute instead of once per second. - Korean language support as been added. - Gatewaying from news -> mail uses its connections to the nntpd more efficiently. - In bin/add_members, -n/--non-digest-members-file command line switch is deprecated in favor of -r/--regular-members-file. - bin/sync_members grew a -g/--goodbye-msg switch. 2.1 beta 1 (16-Mar-2002) In addition to the usual bug fixes, performance improvements, and GUI changes, here are the highlights: - MIME and other message handling o More robustness against badly MIME encapsulated messages: if a MessageParseError is raised during the initial parse, the message can either be discarded or saved in qfiles/bad, depending on the value of the new configuration variable QRUNNER_SAVE_BAD_MESSAGES. o There is a new per-user option that can be used to avoid receipt of extra copies, when a member of the list is also explicitly CC'd. o Always add an RFC 2822 Date: header if missing, since not all MTAs insert one automatically. o The Sender: and Errors-To: headers are no longer added to outgoing messages. o Headers and footers are always added by concatenation, if the message is not MIME and if the list's charset is a superset of us-ascii. - List administration o An `invitation' feature has been added. This is selectable as a radio button on the mass subscribe page. When selected, users are invited to join instead of immediately joined, i.e. they get a confirmation message. o You can now enable and disable list owner notifications for disabled-due-to-bouncing and removal-due-to-bouncing actions. The site config variables DEFAULT_BOUNCE_NOTIFY_OWNER_ON_DISABLE and DEFAULT_BOUNCE_NOTIFY_OWNER_ON_REMOVAL control the default behavior. o List owners can now decide whether they receive unrecognized bounce messages or not (i.e. messages that the bounce processor doesn't recognize). Site admins can set the default value for this flag with the config variable DEFAULT_BOUNCE_UNRECOGNIZED_GOES_TO_LIST_OWNER. o The admindb summary page gives the option of clearing the moderation flag of members who are on quarantined. o The action to take when a moderated member posts to a list is now configurable. The message can either be held, rejected (bounced), or discarded. If the message is rejected, a rejection notice string can be given. o In the General admin page, you can now set the default value for five per-user flags: concealing the user's email address, acknowledging posts sent by the user, copy suppression, not-me-too selection, and the default digest type. Site admins can set the default bit field with the new DEFAULT_NEW_MEMBER_OPTIONS variable. o A new "Emergency brake" feature for turning on moderation of all list postings. This is useful for when flamewars break out, and the list needs a cooling off period. Messages containing an Approved: header with the list owner password are still allowed through, as are messages approved through the admindb interface. o When a moderated message is approved for the list, add an X-Mailman-Approved-At: header which contains the timestamp of the approval action (changed from X-Moderated: with a different format). o Lists can now be converted to using a less error prone mechanism for variable substitution syntax in headers and footers. Instead of %(var)s strings, you'd use $var strings. You must use "bin/withlist -r convert" to enable this. o When moderating held messages, the header text box and the message excerpt text box are now both read-only. o You can't delete the site list through the web. o When creating new lists through the web, you have the option of setting the "default member moderation" flag. - Security and privacy o New feature: banned subscription addresses. Privacy options/subscription rules now have an additional list box which can contain addresses or regular expressions. Subscription requests from any matching address are automatically rejected. o Membership tests which compare message headers against list rosters are now more robust. They now check, by default these header in order: From:, unixfrom, Reply-To:, Sender:. If any match, then the membership test succeeds. o ALLOW_SITE_ADMIN_COOKIES is a new configuration variable which says whether to allow AuthSiteAdmin cookies or not. Normally, when a list administrator logs into a list with the site password, they are issued a cookie that only allows them to do administration for this one list. By setting ALLOW_SITE_ADMIN_COOKIES to 1, the user only needs to authenticate to one list with the site password, and they can administer any mailing list. I'm not sure this feature is wise, so the default value for ALLOW_SITE_ADMIN_COOKIES is 0. o Marc MERLIN's new recipes for secure Linuxes have been updated. o DEFAULT_PRIVATE_ROSTER now defaults to 1. o Passwords are no longer included in the confirmation pages. - Internationalization o With the approval of Tamito KAJIYAMA, the Japanese codecs for Python are now included automatically, so you don't need to download and install these separate. It is installed in a Mailman-specific place so it won't affect your larger Python installation. o The configure script will produce a warning if the Chinese codes are not installed. This is not a fatal error. o Russian templates and catalogs have been added. o Finnish templates and catalogs have been added. - Scripts and utilities o New program bin/unshunt to safely move shunted messages back into the appropriate processing queue. o New program bin/inject for sending a plaintext message into the incoming queue from the command line. o New cron script cron/disabled for periodically culling the disabled membership. o bin/list_members has grown some new command line switches for filtering on different criteria (digest mode, disable mode, etc.) o bin/remove_members has grown the --fromall switch. o You can now do a bin/rmlist -a to remove an archive even after the list has been deleted. o bin/update removes the $prefix/Mailman/pythonlib directory. o bin/withlist grows a --all/-a flag so the --run/-r option can be applied to all the mailing lists. Also, interactive mode is now the default if -r isn't used. You don't need to run this script as "python -i bin/withlist" anymore. o There is a new script contrib/majordomo2mailman.pl which should ease the transition from Majordomo to Mailman. - MTA integration o Postfix integration has been made much more robust, but now you have to set POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD and POSTFIX_MAP_CMD to point to the postalias and postmap commands respectively. o VERP-ish delivery has been made much more efficient by eliminating extra disk copies of messages for each recipient of a VERP delivery. It has also been made more robust in the face of failures during chunk delivery. This required a rewrite of SMTPDirect.py and one casualty of that rewrite was the experimental threaded delivery. It is no longer supported (but /might/ be resurrected if there's enough demand -- or a contributed patch :). o A new site config variable SMTP_MAX_SESSIONS_PER_CONNECTION specifies how many consecutive SMTP sessions will be conducted down the same socket connection. Some MTAs have a limit on this. o Support for VERP-ing confirmation messages. These are less error prone since the Subject: header doesn't need to be retained, and they allow a more user friendly (and i18n'd) Subject: header. VERP_CONFIRM_FORMAT, VERP_CONFIRM_REGEXP, and VERP_CONFIRMATIONS control this feature (only supported for invitation confirmations currently, but will be expanded to the other confirmations). o Several new list-centric addresses have been added: -subscribe and -unsubscribe are synonyms for -join and -leave, respectively. Also -confirm has been added to support VERP'd confirmations. - Archiver o There's now a default page for the Pipermail archive link for when no messages have yet been posted to the list. o Just the mere presence of an X-No-Archive: is enough to inhibit archiving for this message; the value of the header is now ignored. - Configuring, building, installing o Mailman now has a new favicon, donated by Terry Oda. Not all web pages are linked to the favicon yet though. o The add-on email package is now distributed and installed automatically, so you don't need to do this. It is installed in a Mailman-specific place so it won't affect your larger Python installation. o The default value of VERP_REGEXP has changed. o New site configuration variables BADQUEUE_DIR and QRUNNER_SAVE_BAD_MESSAGES which describe where to save messages which are not properly MIME encoded. o configure should be more POSIX-ly conformant. o The Mailman/pythonlib directory has been removed, but a new $prefix/pythonlib directory has been added. o Regression tests are now installed. o The second argument to add_virtual() calls in mm_cfg.py are now optional. o DEFAULT_FIRST_STRIP_REPLY_TO now defaults to 0. o Site administrators can edit the Mailman/Site.py file to customize some filesystem layout policies. 2.1 alpha 4 (31-Dec-2001) - The administrative requests database page (admindb) has been redesigned for better usability when there are lots of held postings. Changes include: o A summary page which groups held messages by sender email address. On this page you can dispose of all the sender's messages in one action. You can also view the details of all the sender's messages, or the details of a single message. You can also add the sender to one of the list's sender filters. o A details page where you can view all messages, just those for a particular sender, or just a single held message. This details page is laid out the same as the old admindb page. o The instructions have been shorted on the summary and details page, with links to more detailed explanations. - Bounce processing o Mailman now keeps track of the reason a member's delivery has been disabled: explicitly by the administrator, explicitly by the user, by the system due to excessive bounces, or for (legacy) unknown reasons. o A new bounce processing algorithm has been implemented (we might actually understand this one ;). When an address starts bouncing, the member gets a "bounce score". Hard (fatal) bounces score 1.0, while soft (transient) bounces score 0.5. List administrators can specify a bounce threshold above which a member gets disabled. They can also specify a time interval after which, if no bounces are received from the member, the member's bounce score is considered stale and is thrown away. o A new cron script, cron/disabled, periodically sends notifications to members who are bounce disabled. After a certain number of warnings the member is deleted from the list. List administrators can control both the number of notifications and the amount of time between notifications. Notifications include a confirmation cookie that the member can use to re-enable their subscription, via email or web. o New configuration variables to support the bounce processing are DEFAULT_BOUNCE_SCORE_THRESHOLD, DEFAULT_BOUNCE_INFO_STALE_AFTER, DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS, DEFAULT_BOUNCE_YOU_ARE_DISABLED_WARNINGS_INTERVAL. - Privacy and security o Sender filters can now be regular expressions. If a line starts with ^ it is taken as a (raw string) regular expression, otherwise it is a literal email address. o Fixes in 2.0.8 ported forward: prevent cross-site scripting exploits. - Mail delivery o Aliases have all been changed so that there's more consistency between the alias a message gets delivered to, and the script & queue runner that handles the message. I've also renamed the mail wrapper script to `mailman' from `wrapper' to avoid collisions with other MLM's. You /will/ need to regenerate your alias files with bin/genaliases, and you may need to update your smrsh (Sendmail) configs.a Bounces always go to listname-bounces now, since administration has been separated from bounce processing. listname-admin is obsolete. o VERP support! This greatly improves the accuracy of bounce detection. Configuration variables which control this feature include VERP_DELIVERY_INTERVAL, VERP_PERSONALIZED_DELIVERIES, VERP_PASSWORD_REMINDERS, VERP_REGEXP, and VERP_FORMAT. The latter two must be tuned to your MTA. o A new alias mailman-loop@dom.ain is added which directs all output to the file $prefix/data/owner-bounces.mbox. This is used when sending messages to the site list owners, as the final fallback for bouncing messages. o New configuration variable POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS which should be set if you are using the Postfix MTA and want Mailman to play nice with Postfix-style virtual domains. - Miscellaneous o Better interoperability with Python 2.2. o MailList objects now record the date (in seconds since epoch) that they were created. This is in a hidden attribute `created_at'. o bin/qrunner grows a -s/--subproc switch which is usually used only when it's started from mailmanctl. o bin/newlist grows a -l/--language option so that the list's preferred language can be set from the command line. o cron changes: admin reminders go out at 8am local time instead of 10pm local time. - Pipermail archiver o MIME attachments are scrubbed out into separate files which can be viewed by following a link in the original article. Article contains an indication of the size of the attachment, its type, and other useful information. o New script bin/cleanarch which can be used to `clean' an .mbox archive file by fixing unescaped embedded Unix From_ lines. o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_SCRUBBER in Defaults.py.in which names the module that Pipermail should use to scrub articles of MIME attachments. o New configuration variable ARCHIVE_HTML_SANITIZER which describes how the scrubber should handle text/html attachments. o PUBLIC_ARCHIVE_URL has change its semantics. It is now an absolute url, with the hostname and listname parts interpolated into it on a per-list basis. o Pipermail should now provide the proper character set in the Content-Type: header for archived articles. - Internationalization o Czech translations by Dan Ohnesorg. o The Hungarian charset has be fixed to be iso-8859-2. o The member options login page now has a language selection widget. - Building, configuration o email-0.96 package is required (see the misc directory). o New recipes for integrating Mailman and Sendmail, contributed by David Champion. 2.1 alpha 3 (22-Oct-2001) - Realname support o Mailman now tracks a member's Real Name in addition to their email address. o List members can now supply their Real Names when subscribing via the web. Their Real Names are parsed from any thru-email subscriptions. o Members can change their Real Names on their options page, and admins can change members' Real Names on the membership pages. Mass subscribing accepts "email@dom.ain (Real Name)" and "Real Name " entries, for both in-text-box and file-upload mass subscriptions. - Filtering and Privacy o Reply-To: munging has been enhanced to allow a wider range of list policies. You can now pre-strip any Reply-To: headers before adding list-specific ones (i.e. you can override or extend existing Reply-To: headers). If stripping, the old headers are no longer saved on X-Reply-To: o New sender moderation rules. The old `posters', `member_only_posting', `moderated' and `forbidden_posters' options have been removed in favor of a new moderation scheme. Each member has a personal moderation bit, and non-member postings can be automatically accepted, held for approval, rejected (bounced) or discarded. o When membership rosters are private, responses to subscription (and other) requests are made more generic so that these processes can't be covertly mined for hidden addresses. If a subscription request comes in for a user who is already subscribed, the user is notified of potential membership mining. o When a held message is approved via the admindb page, an X-Moderated: header is added to the message. o List admins can now set an unsubscribe policy which requires them to approve of member unsubscriptions. - Web U/I o All web confirmations now require a two-click procedure, where the first click gives them a page that allows them to confirm or cancel their subscription. It is bad form for an email click (HTTP GET) to have side effects. o Lots of improvements for clarity. o The Privacy category has grown three subcategories. o The General options page as a number of subsection headers. o The Passwords and Languages categories are now on separate admin pages. o The admin subcategories are now formated as two columns in the top and bottom legends. o When creating a list through the web, you can now specify the initial list of supported languages. o The U/I for unsubscribing a member on the admin's membership page should be more intuitive now. o There is now a separate configuration option for whether the goodbye_msg is sent when a member is unsubscribed. - Performance o misc/mailman is a Unix init script, appropriate for /etc/init.d, and containing chkconfig hooks for systems that support it. o bin/mailmanctl has been rewritten; the `restart' command actually works now. It now also accepts -s, -q, and -u options. o bin/qrunner has been rewritten too; it can serve the role of the old cron/qrunner script for those who want classic cron-invoked mail delivery. o Internally, messages are now stored in the qfiles directory primarily as pickles. List configuration databases are now stored as pickles too (i.e. config.pck). bin/dumpdb knows how to display both pickles and marshals. - Mail delivery o If a user's message is held for approval, they are sent a notification message containing a confirmation cookie. They can use this confirmation cookie to cancel their own postings (if they haven't already been approved). o When held messages are forwarded to an explicit address using the admindb page, it is done so in a message/rfc822 encapsulation. o When a message is first held for approval, the notification sent to the list admin is a 3-part multipart/mixed. The first part holds the notification message, the second part hold the original message, and the third part hold a cookie confirmation message, to which the admin can respond to approve or discard the message via email. o In the mail->news gateway, you can define mail headers that must be modified or deleted before the message can be posted to the nntp server. o The list admin can send an immediate urgent message to the entire list membership, bypassing digest delivery. This is done by adding an Urgent: header with the list password. Urgent messages with an invalid password are rejected. o Lists can now optionally personalize email messages, if the site admin allows it. Personalized messages mean that the To: header includes the recipient's address instead of the list's address, and header and footer messages can contain user-specific information. Note that only regular deliveries can currently be personalized. o Message that come from Usenet but that have broken MIME boundaries are ignored. o If the site administrator agrees, list owners have the ability to disable RFC 2369 List-* headers. o There is now an API for an external process to post a message to a list. This posting process can also specify an explicit list of recipients, in effect turning the mailing list into a "virtual list" with a fluid membership. See Mailman/Post.py for details. - Building/testing/configuration o mimelib is no longer required, but you must install the email package (see the tarball in the misc directory). o An (as yet) incomplete test suite has been added. Don't try running it in a production environment! o Better virtual host support by adding a mapping from the host name given in cgi's HTTP_HOST/SERVER_NAME variable to the email host used in list addresses. (E.g. www.python.org maps to @python.org). o Specifying urls to external public archivers is more flexible. o The filters/ subdirectory has been removed. o There is now a `site list' which is a mailing list that must be created first, and from which all password reminders appear to come from. It is recommended that this list be called "mailman@your.site". o bin/move_list is no longer necessary (see the FAQ for detailed instructions on renaming a list). o A new script bin/fix_url.py can be used with bin/withlist to change a list's web_page_url configuration variable (since it is no longer modifiable through the web). - Internationalization o Support for German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, and Norwegian have been added. - Miscellaneous o Lots of new bounce detectors. Bounce detectors can now discard temporary bounce messages by returning a special Stop value. o bin/withlist now sports a -q/--quiet flag. o bin/add_members has a new -a/--admin-notify flag which can be used to inhibit list owner notification for each subscription. - Membership Adaptors o Internally, mailing list memberships are accessed through a MemberAdaptor interface. This would allow for integrating membership databases with external sources (e.g. Zope or LDAP), although the only MemberAdaptor currently implemented is a "classic" adaptor which stores the membership information on the MailList object. o There's a new pipeline handler module called FileRecips.py which could be used to get all regular delivery mailing list recipients from a Sendmail-style :include: file (see List Extensibility bullet below). This work was sponsored by Control.com - List Extensibility o A framework has been added which can be used to specialize and extend specific mailing lists. If there is a file called lists//extend.py, it is execfile()'d after the MailList object is instantiated. The file should contain a function extend() which will be called with the MailList instance. This function can do all sorts of deep things, like modify the handler pipeline just for this list, or even strip out particular admin GUI elements (see below). o All the admin page GUI elements are now separate components. This provides greater flexibility for list customization. Also, each GUI element will be given an opportunity to handle admin CGI form data. This work was sponsored by Control.com - Topic Filters o A new feature has been added called "Topic Filters". A list administrator can create topics, which are essentially regular expression matches against Subject: and Keyword: headers (including such pseudo-headers if they appear in the first few lines of the body of a message). List members can then `subscribe' to various topics, which allows them to filter out any messages that don't match a topic, or to filter out any message that does match a topic. This can be useful for high volume lists where not everyone will be interested in every message. This work was sponsored by Control.com 2.1 alpha 2 (11-Jul-2001) - Building o mimelib 0.4 is now required. Get it from http://mimelib.sf.net. If you've installed an earlier version of mimelib, you must upgrade. o /usr/local/mailman is now the default installation directory. Use configure's --prefix switch to change it back to the default (/home/mailman) or any other installation directory of your choice. - Security o Better definition of authentication domains. The following roles have been defined: user, list-admin, list-moderator, creator, site-admin. o There is now a separate role of "list moderator", which has access to the pending requests (admindb) page, but not the list configuration pages. o Subscription confirmations can now be performed via email or via URL. When a subscription is received, a unique (sha) confirm URL is generated in the confirmation message. Simply visiting this URL completes the subscription process. o In a similar manner, removal requests (via web or email command) no longer require the password. If the correct password is given, the removal is performed immediately. If no password is given, then a confirmation message is generated. - Internationalization o More I18N patches. The basic infrastructure should now be working correctly. Spanish templates and catalogs are included, and English, French, Hungarian, and Big5 templates are included. o Cascading specializations and internationalization of templates. Templates are now search for in the following order: list-specific location, domain-specific location, site-wide location, global defaults. Each search location is further qualified by the language being displayed. This means that you only need to change the templates that are different from the global defaults. Templates renamed: admlogin.txt => admlogin.html Templates added: private.html - Web UI o Redesigned the user options page. It now sits behind an authentication so user options cannot be viewed without the proper password. The other advantage is that the user's password need not be entered on the options page to unsubscribe or change option values. The login screen also provides for password mail-back, and unsubscription w/ confirmation. Other new features accessible from the user options page include: ability to change email address (with confirmation) both per-list and globally for all list on virtual domain; global membership password changing; global mail delivery disable/enable; ability to suppress password reminders both per-list and globally; logout button. [Note: the handle_opts cgi has gone away] o Color schemes for non-template based web pages can be defined via mm_cfg. o Redesign of the membership management page. The page is now split into three subcategories (Membership List, Mass Subscription, and Mass Removal). The Membership List subcategory now supports searching for member addresses by regular expression, and if necessary, it groups member addresses first alphabetically, and then by chunks. Mass Subscription and Mass Removal now support file upload, with one address per line. o Hyperlinks from the logos in the footers have been removed. The sponsors got too much "unsubscribe me!" spam from desperate user of Mailman at other sites. o New buttons on the digest admin page to send a digest immediately (if it's non-empty), to start a new digest volume with the next digest, and to select the interval with which to automatically start a new digest volume (yearly, monthly, quarterly, weekly, daily). DEFAULT_DIGEST_VOLUME_FREQUENCY is a new configuration variable, initially set to give a new digest volume monthly. o Through-the-web list creation and removal, using a separate site-wide authentication role called the "list creator and destroyer" or simply "list creator". If the configuration variable OWNERS_CAN_DELETE_THEIR_OWN_LISTS is set to 1 (by default, it's 0), then list admins can delete their own lists. This feature requires an adaptor for the particular MTA you're using. An adaptor for Postfix is included, as is a dumb adaptor that just emails mailman@yoursite with the necessary Sendmail style /etc/alias file changes. Some MTAs like Exim can be configured to automatically recognize new lists. The adaptor is selected via the MTA option in mm_cfg.py - Email UI o In email commands, "join" is a synonym for "subscribe". "remove" and "leave" are synonyms for "unsubscribe". New robot addresses are support to make subscribing and unsubscribing much easier: mylist-join@mysite mylist-leave@mysite o Confirmation messages have a shortened Subject: header, containing just the word "confirm" and the confirmation cookie. This should help for MUAs that like to wrap long Subject: lines, messing up confirmation. o Mailman now recognizes an Urgent: header, which, if it contains the list moderator or list administrator password, forces the message to be delivered immediately to all members (i.e. both regular and digest members). The message is also placed in the digest. If the password is incorrect, the message will be bounced back to the sender. - Performance o Refinements to the new qrunner subsystem which preserves FIFO order of messages. o The qrunner is no longer started from cron. It is started by a Un*x init-style script called bin/mailmanctl (see below). cron/qrunner has been removed. - Command line scripts o bin/mailmanctl script added, which is used to start, stop, and restart the qrunner daemon. o bin/qrunner script added which allows a single sub-qrunner to run once through its processing loop. o bin/change_pw script added (eases mass changing of list passwords). o bin/update grows a -f switch to force an update. o bin/newlang renamed to bin/addlang; bin/rmlang removed. o bin/mmsitepass has grown a -c option to set the list creator's password. The site-wide `create' web page is linked to from the admin overview page. o bin/newlist's -o option is removed. This script also grows a way of spelling the creation of a list in a specific virtual domain. o The `auto' script has been removed. o bin/dumpdb has grown -m/--marshal and -p/--pickle options. o bin/list_admins can be used to print the owners of a mailing list. o bin/genaliases regenerates from scratch the aliases and aliases.db file for the Postfix MTA. - Archiver o New archiver date clobbering option, which allows dates to only be clobber if they are outrageously out-of-date (default setting is 15 days on either side of received timestamp). New configuration variables: ARCHIVER_CLOBBER_DATE_POLICY ARCHIVER_ALLOWABLE_SANE_DATE_SKEW The archived copy of messages grows an X-List-Received-Date: header indicating the time the message was received by Mailman. o PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL configuration variable is removed (this can be calculated on the fly, and removing it actually makes site configuration easier). - Miscellaneous o Several new README's have been added. o Most syslog entries for the qrunner have been redirected to logs/error. o On SIGHUP, qrunner will re-open all its log files and restart all child processes. See "bin/mailmanctl restart". - Patches and bug fixes o SF patches and bug fixes applied: 420396, 424389, 227694, 426002, 401372 (partial), 401452. o Fixes in 2.0.5 ported forward: Fix a lock stagnation problem that can result when the user hits the `stop' button on their browser during a write operation that can take a long time (e.g. hitting the membership management admin page). o Fixes in 2.0.4 ported forward: Python 2.1 compatibility release. There were a few questionable constructs and uses of deprecated modules that caused annoying warnings when used with Python 2.1. This release quiets those warnings. o Fixes in 2.0.3 ported forward: Bug fix release. There was a small typo in 2.0.2 in ListAdmin.py for approving an already subscribed member (thanks Thomas!). Also, an update to the OpenWall security workaround (contrib/securelinux_fix.py) was included. Thanks to Marc Merlin. 2.1 alpha 1 (04-Mar-2001) - Python 2.0 or newer required. Also required is `mimelib' a new library for handling MIME documents. This will be bundled in future releases, but for now, you must download and install it (using Python's distutils) from http://barry.wooz.org/software/Code/mimelib-0.2.tar.gz You need mimelib 0.2 or better. - Redesigned qrunner subsystem. Now there are multiple message queues, and considerable flexibility in file formats for integration with external systems. The current crop of queues include: archive -- for posting messages to an archiver commands -- for incoming email commands and bounces in -- for list-destined incoming email news -- for messages outgoing to a nntp server out -- for messages outgoing to a smtp server shunt -- for messages that trigger unexpected exceptions in Mailman virgin -- for messages that are generated by Mailman cron/qrunner is now a long running script that forks off sub-runners for each of the above queues. qrunner still plays nice with cron, but it is expected to be started by init at some point in the future. Some support exists for parallel processing of messages in the queues. - Support for internationalization support merged in. Original work done by Juan Carlos Rey Anaya and Victoriano Giralt. I've tested about 90% of the web side, 50% of the email, and 50% of the command line / cron scripts. New scripts: bin/newlang, bin/rmlang - New delivery script `auto' for automatic integration with the Postfix MTA. - A bunch of new bounce detectors. Changes ported from Mailman 2.0.2 and 2.0.1: - A fix for a potential privacy exploit where a clever list administrator could gain access to user passwords. This doesn't allow them to do much more harm to the user then they normally could, but they still shouldn't have access to the passwords. - In the admindb page, don't complain when approving a subscription of someone who's already on the list (SF bug #222409 - Thomas Wouters). Also, quote for HTML the Subject: text printed for held messages, otherwise messages with e.g. "Subject: " could royally screw page formatting. - Docstring fix bin/newlist to remove mention of "immediate" argument (Thomas Wouters). - Fix for bin/update when PREFIX != VAR_PREFIX (SF bug #229794 -- Thomas Wouters). - Bug fix release, namely fixes a buglet in bin/withlist affecting the -l and -r flags; also a problem that can cause qrunner to stop processing mail after disk-full events (SourceForge bug 127199). 2.0 final (21-Nov-2000) No changes from rc3. 2.0 release candidate 3 (16-Nov-2000) - By popular demand, Reply-To: munging policy is now to always override any Reply-To: header in the original message, if reply_goes_to_list is set to "This list" or "Explicit Address" - bin/newlist given -q/--quiet flag instead of the positional argument - Hopefully last fix to DEFAULT_URL not ending in a slash sensitivity - 2.0rc2 buglets fixed: o newlist argument parsing o updating with unlocked lists o HyperArch.py traceback when there's no Content-Transfer-Encoding: header - SourceForge bugs fixed: 122358 (qmail-to-mailman.py listname case folding) - SourceForge patches applied: 102373 (qmail-to-mailman.py listname case folding) 2.0 release candidate 2 (10-Nov-2000) - Documentation updates: start at admin/www/index.html - bin/withlist accepts additional command line arguments when used with the --run flag; bin/mmsitepass and bin/newlist accept -h/--help flags - bin/newlist has a -o/--output flag to append /etc/aliases suggestions to a specified file - SourceForge bugs fixed: 116615 (README.BSD update), 117015 (duplicate messages on moderated posts), 117548 (exception in HyperArch.py), 117682 (typos), 121185 (vsnprintf signature), 121591 and 122017 (bogus link after web unsubscribe), 121811 (`subscribe' in Subject: doesn't get archived) - SourceForge patches applied: 101812 (securelinux_fix.py contrib), 102097 (fix for bug 117548), 102211 (additional args for withlist), 102268 (case insensitive Content-Transfer-Encoding:) 2.0 release candidate 1 (23-Oct-2000) - Bug fixes and security patches. - Better html rendition of articles in non us-ascii charsets (Jeremy Hylton). See VERBATIM_ENCODING variable in Defaults.py.in for customization. 2.0 beta 6 (22-Sep-2000) - Building o Tested with Python 1.5.2, Python 1.6, and Python 2.0 beta 1. Conducted on RH Linux 6.1 only, but should work cross-platform. o Configure now accepts --with-username, --with-groupname, --with-var-prefix flags. See `configure --help' or the INSTALL file for details. o Setting the CFLAGS environment variable before invoking configure now works. o The icons are now copied into $prefix/icons at install time. Patch by David Champion. - Standards o Compliance with RFC 2369 (List-*: headers). Patch by Darrell Fuhriman. List-ID: header is kept for historical reasons. o Fixes by Jeremy Hylton to Pipermail in support of non-ASCII charsets, based on the Content-Type: and encoded-words in the original message. Mail headers are now decoded as per RFC 2047. o Many more bounce formats are detected: Microsoft's SMTPSVC, Compuserve, GroupWise, SMTP32, and the more generic SimpleMatch (which catches lots of similar but slightly different formats). - Defaults o Email addresses can now be obscured in Pipermail archives by setting mm_cfg.ARCHIVER_OBSCURES_EMAILADDRS to 1 (obscuring is turned off by default). Patch provided by Chris Snell. o The default NNTP host can now be set by editing mm_cfg.DEFAULT_NNTP_HOST. Patch by David Champion. o The default archiving mode (public/private) can now be set by editing mm_cfg.DEFAULT_ARCHIVE. Patch by Ted Cabeen. - Web UI o The variable details pages in the administrators interface is now `live', i.e. there's a submit button on the details page. o A link to the administrative interface is placed in the footer of the general user pages (authentication still required, of course!) o The user options change results page has a link back to the user's main page. o In the admindb page (for dealing with held postings), the default forward address is now listname-owner instead of listname-admin. This avoids bounce detection on the forwarded message. - Miscellaneous o Fixed config.db corruption problem when disk-full errors are encountered. o Command line scripts accept list names case-insensitively. o bin/remove_members takes a -a flag to remove all members of a list in one fell swoop. o List admin passwords must be non-empty. o Mailman generated passwords are slightly more mnemonic, and shouldn't have confusing character selections (i.e. `i' only, but no `1' or `l'). o Crossposting to two gated mailing lists should be fixed. o Many other bug fixes and minor web UI improvements. 2.0 beta 5 (01-Aug-2000) - Bug fix release. This includes a fix for a small security hole which could be exploited to gain mailman group access by a local user (not a mail or web user). - As part of the fix for the "cookie reauthorization" bug, only session cookies are used now. This means that administrative and private archive cookies expire only when the browser session is quit, however an explicit "Logout" button has been added. 2.0 beta 4 (06-Jul-2000) - Bug fix release. 2.0 beta 3 (29-Jun-2000) - Delivery mechanism (qrunner) refined to support immediate queuing, queuing directly from MTA, and queuing on any error along the delivery pipeline. This means 1) that huge lists can't time out the MTA's program delivery channel; 2) it is much harder to completely lose messages; 3) eventually, qrunner will be elaborated to meter delivery to the MTA so as not to swamp it. The tradeoff is in more disk I/O since every message coming into the system (and most that are generated by the system) live on disk for some part of their journey through Mailman. For now, see the Default.py variables QRUNNER_PROCESS_LIFETIME and QRUNNER_MAX_MESSAGES for primitive resource management. The API to the pipeline handler modules has changed. See Mailman/Handlers/HandlerAPI.py for details. - Revamped admindb web page: held messages are split into headers and bodies so they are easier to vette; admins can now also preserve a held message (for spam evidence gathering) or forward the message to a specified email address; disposition of held messages can be deferred; held messages have a more context meaningful default rejection message. - Change to the semantics for `acceptable_aliases' list configuration variable, based on suggestions by Harald Meland. - New mm_cfg.py variables NNTP_USERNAME and NNTP_PASSWORD can be set on a site-wide basis if connection to your nntpd requires authentication. - The list attribute `num_spawns' has been removed. The mm_cfg.py variables MAX_SPAWNS, and DEFAULT_NUM_SPAWNS removed too. - LIST_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked to 5 hours and LIST_LOCK_TIMEOUT shortened to 10 seconds. QRUNNER_LOCK_LIFETIME cranked up to 10 hours. This should decrease the changes for bogus and harmful lock breaking. - Resent-to: is now one of the headers checked for explicit destinations. - Tons more bounce formats are recognized. The API to the bounce modules has changed. - A rewritten LockFile module which should fix most (hopefully all) bugs in the locking machinery. Many improvements suggested by Thomas Wouters and Harald Meland. - Experimental support (disabled by default) for delivering SMTP chunks to the MTA via multiple threads. Your Python executable must have been compiled with thread support enabled, and you must set MAX_DELIVERY_THREADS in mm_cfg.py. Note that this may not improve your overall system performance. - Some changes and additions to scripts: bin/find_member now supports a -w/--owner flag to match regexps against mailing list owners; bin/find_member now supports multiple regexps; cron/gate_news command line option changes; new script bin/dumbdb for debugging purposes; bin/clone_member can now also remove the old address and change change the list owner addresses. - The News/Mail gateway admin page has a button that lets you do an explicit catchup of the newsgroup. - The CVS repository has been moved out to SourceForge. For more information, see the project summary at http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=103 - Lots 'o bug fixes and some performance improvements. 2.0 beta 2 (07-Apr-2000) - Rewritten gate_news cron script which should be more efficient and avoid race and locking problems. Each list now maintains its own watermark, and when you use the admin CGI script to turn on gating from Usenet->mail, an automatic mass catch up is done to avoid flooding the mailing list. cron/gate_news's command line interface has also changed. See its docstring for details. - A new cron script called qrunner has been added to retry message deliveries that fail because of temporary smtpd problems. - New command line script called bin/list_lists which does exactly that: lists all the mailing lists on the system (much like the listinfo CGI does). - bin/withlist is now directly executable, however if you want to use python -i, you must still explicitly invoke it. bin/withlist also now cleans up after itself by unlocking any locked lists. It does NOT save any dirty lists though - you must do this explicitly. - $prefix permissions (and all subdirs) must now be 02775. bin/check_perms has been updated to fix all the subdir permissions. - "make update" (a.k.a. bin/update) is run automatically when you do a "make install" - The CGI driver script now puts information about the Python environment into the logs/error file (but not the diagnostic web page). - Bug fixes and some performance improvements 2.0 beta 1 (19-Mar-2000) - Python 1.5.2 (or newer) is now required. - A new bundled auto-responder has been added. You can now configure an autoresponse text for each list's primary addresses: listname@yourhost.com -- the general posting address listname-request@... -- the automated "request bot" address listname-admin@... -- the human administrator address - The standard UI now includes three logos at the bottom of the page: Dragon's Mailman logo, the Python Powered logo, and the GNU logo. All point to their respective home pages. - It is now possible to set the Reply-To: field on lists to an arbitrary address. NOTE: Reply-To: munging is generally considered harmful! However for some read-only lists, it is useful to direct replies to a parallel discussion list. - There is a new message delivery architecture which uses a pipeline processor for incoming and internally generated messages. Mailman no longer contains a bundled bulk-mailer; instead message delivery is handled completely by the MTA. Most MTAs give a high enough priority to connections from the localhost that mail will not be lost because of system load, but this is not guaranteed (or handled) by Mailman currently. Be careful also if your smtpd is on a different host than the Mailman host. In practice, mail lossage has not be observed. For this reason cron/run_queue is no longer needed (see the UPGRADING file for details). Also, you can choose whether you want direct smtp delivery, or delivery via the command line to a sendmail-compatible daemon. You can also easily add your own delivery module. See Mailman/Defaults.py for details. - A similar pipeline architecture for the parsing of bounce messages has been added. Most common bounce formats are now handled, including Qmail, Postfix, and DSN. It is now much easier to add new bounce detectors. - The approval pending architecture has also been revamped. Subscription requests and message posts waiting for admin approval are no longer kept in the config.db file, but in a separate requests.db file instead. - Finally made consistent the use of Sender:/From:/From_ in the matching of headers for such things as member-post-only. Now, if USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER is true, Sender: will always be chosen over From:, however the default has been changed to USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER false so that From: is always chosen over Sender:. In both cases, if no header is found, From_ (i.e. the envelope sender is used). Note that the variable is now misnamed! Most people want From: matching anyway and any are easily spoofable. - New scripts bin/move_list, bin/config_list - cron/upvolumes_yearly, cron/upvolumes_monthly, cron/archive, cron/run_queue all removed. Edit your crontab if you used these scripts. Other scripts removed: contact_transport, deliver, dumb_deliver. - Several web UI improvements, especially in the admin page. - Remove X-pmrqc: headers to prevent return reciepts for Pegasus mail users. - Security patch when using external archivers. - Honor "X-Archive: No" header by not putting this message in the archive. - Changes to the log file format. - The usual bug fixes. 1.1 (05-Nov-1999) - All GIFs removed. See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/gif.html for the reason why. - Improvements to the Pipermail archiver which make things faster. Primary change is that the .txt files are not gzipped on every posted message. Instead, use the new cron script `nightly_gzip' to gzip the .txt file in batches (this means that the .txt file will lag behind the on-line archives a little). - From the C drivers programs, Python is invoked with the -S option. This tells Python to avoid importing the site module, which can improve start up time of the Python process considerably. Note that the command line script invocation has not been changed. - New configuration variables PUBLIC_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER and PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER which can contain a shell command string for os.popen(). This can be used to invoke an external archiver instead of the bundled Pipermail archiver. See Defaults.py for details. - new script `bin/find_member' which can be used to search for a member by regular expression. - More child processes are reaped, which should eliminate most occurrences of zombie processes. - A few small miscellaneous bug fixes (including PR#99, PR#107) and improvements to the file locking algorithms. 1.0 (30-Jul-1999) - Configure script now allows $PREFIX (by default /home/mailman) to be permissions 02755. Also, configure now tests for vsnprintf() - Workaround, taken from GNU screen, for systems missing vsnprintf() - Return-Receipt-To: and Disposition-Notification-To: headers are always removed from posted messages (they can be used to troll for list membership). - Workaround for MSIE4.01 (and possibly other versions) bug in the handling of cookies. - A small collection of other bug fixes. 1.0rc3 (10-Jul-1999) - new script bin/check_perms which checks (and optionally fixes) the permissions and group ownerships of the files in your Mailman installation. - Removed a bottleneck in the archiving code that was causing performance problems on highly loaded servers. - The code that saves a list's state and configuration database has been made more robust. - Additional exception handlers have been added in several places to alleviate problems with Mailman bombing out when it really would be better to print/log a helpful message. - The "password" mail command will now mail back the sender's subscription password when given with no arguments. - The embarrassing subject-prefixing bug present in rc2 has been fixed. - A small (but nice :) collection of other squashed bugs. 1.0rc2 (14-Jun-1999) - A security flaw in the CGI cookie mechanisms was discovered -- the Mailman-issued cookies were easily spoofable, implying that e.g. admin access to all Mailman lists via the web interface could be compromised. This flaw has now been fixed. - Handling of SMTP errors has been improved. - Both "Mass Subscription" via web admin interface and bin/add_members have been greatly sped up. - autoconf check for syslog has been revamped, and is now verified to work on SCO OpenServer 5. If syslog can't be found, the C wrappers will compile, but without any syslog calls. - Various other bug fixes. 1.0rc1 (04-May-1999) - There is a new Mailman logo, contributed by The Dragon De Monsyne. Please read the INSTALL file for information about installing the logo in a place your Web server can find it. - USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER is now set to 0 by default. Turning this on caused problems for too many users; lists restricted to member-only posts were not matching the addresses correctly. - A revamped bin/withlist to be a little more useful. - A revamped cron/mailpasswds which groups users by virtual hosts. - The usual assortment of bug fixes. 1.0b11 (03-Apr-1999) - Bug fixes and improvements for case preservation of subscribed addresses. The DATA_FILE_VERSION has been bumped to 14. - New script bin/withlist, useful for interactive debugging. 1.0b10 (26-Mar-1999) - New script bin/sync_members which can be used to synchronize a list's membership against a flat (e.g. sendmail :include: style) file. - bin/add_members and bin/remove_members now accept addresses on the command line with `-' as the value for the -d and -n options. - Added variable USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER to Defaults.py for site-wide configuration of address matching scheme. With this variable set to true, the envelope sender (e.g. Unix "From_" header) is used to match addresses, otherwise the From: header is used. Envelope sender matching seems not to work on many systems. This variable is currently defaulted to 1, but may change to 0 for the final release. - Reorganization of the membership management admin page. Also member addresses are linked to their options page. Only the `General' category has the admin password change form. - Major reorganization of email command handling and responses. `notmetoo' is the preferred email command instead of `norcv', although the latter is still accepted as an argument. If more than 5 errors are found in the message, command processing is halted. - User options page now shows the user their case-preserved subscribed address as well. - The usual assortment of bug fixes. 1.0b9 (01-Mar-1999) - New bin scripts: clone_member, list_members, add_members (a consolidation of convertlist and populate_new_list which have been removed). - Two new readmes have been added: README.LINUX and README.QMAIL - New configure option --with-cgi-ext which can be used if your Web server requires extensions on CGI scripts. The extension must include a dot (e.g. --with-cgi-ext=".cgi"). - Many bug fixes, including the setgid problem that was causing mail to be lost on some versions of Linux. 1.0b8 (14-Jan-1999) - Bug fixes and workarounds for certain Linuxes. - Illegal addresses are no longer allowed to be subscribed, from any interface. 1.0b7 (31-Dec-1998) - Many, many bug fixes. Some performance improvements for large lists. Some improvements in the Web interfaces. Some security improvements. Improved compatibility with Python 1.5. - bin/convert_list and bin/populate_new_list have been replaced by bin/add_members. - Admins can now get notification on subscriptions and unsubscriptions. Posts are now logged. - The username portion of email addresses are now case-preserved for delivery purposes. All other address comparisions are case-insensitive. - New default SMTP_MAX_RCPTS that limits the number of "RCPT TO" SMTP commands that can be given for a single message. Most MTAs have some hard limit. - "Precedence: bulk" header and "List-id:" header are now added to all outgoing messages. The latter is not added if the message already has a "List-id:" header. See RFC 2046 and draft-chandhok-listid-02 for details. - The standard (as of Python 1.5.2) smtplib.py is now used. - The install process now compiles all the .py files in the installation. - Versions of the Mailman papers given at IPC7 and LISA-98 are now included. 1.0b6 (07-Nov-1998) - Archiving is (finally) back in. - Administrivia filter added. - Mail queue mechanism revamped with better concurrency control. - For recipients that have estmp MTAs, set delivery notification status so that only delivery failure notices are sent out, inhibiting 4 hour and N day warning notices. - Now expire old unconfirmed subscription requests, rather than keeping them forever. - Added proposed standard List-Id: header, and our own X-MailmanVersion header. - Prevent havoc from attempts to subscribe a list to itself. (!) - Refine mail command processing to prevent loops. - Pending subscription DB redone with better locking and cleaner interface. - posters functionality expanded. - Subscription policy more flexible, sensible, and site-configurable. - Various and sundry bug fixes. 1.0b5 (27-Jul-1998) - New file locking that should be portable and work w/ NFS. - Better use of packages. - Better error logging and reporting. - Less startup overhead. - Various and sundry bug fixes. 1.0b4 (03-Jun-1998) - A configure script for easy installation (Barry Warsaw) - The ability to install Mailman to locations other than /home/mailman (Barry Warsaw) - Use cookies on the admin pages (also hides admin pages from others) (Scott Cotton) - Subscription requests send a request for confirmation, which may be done by simply replying to the message (Scott Cotton) - Facilities for gating mail to a newsgroup, and for gating a newsgroup to a mailing list (John Viega) - Contact the SMTP port instead of calling sendmail (primarily for portability) (John Viega) - Changed all links on web pages to relative links where appropriate. (John Viega) - Use MD5 if crypt is not available (John Viega) - Lots of fixing up of bounce handling (Ken Manheimer) - General UI polishing (Ken Manheimer) - mm_html: Make it prominent when the user's delivery is disabled on his option page. (Ken Manheimer) - mallist:DeleteMember() Delete the option setings if any. (Ken Manheimer) 1.0b3 (03-May-1998) - mm_message:Deliverer.DeliverToList() added missing newline between the headers and message body. Without it, any sequence of initial body lines that _looked_ like headers ("Sir: Please excuse my impertinence, but") got treated like headers. - Fixed typo which broke subscription acknowledgement message (thanks to janne sinkonen for pointing this out promptly after release). (Anyone who applied my intermediate patch will probably see this one trigger patch'es reversed-patch detector...) - Fixed cgi-wrapper.c so it doesn't segfault when invoked with improper uid or gid, and generally wrappers are cleaned up a bit. - Prevented delivery-failure notices for misdirected subscribe- confirmation requests from bouncing back to the -request addr, and then being treated as failing requests. Implemented two measures. Set the reply-to for the confirmation- request to the -request addr, and the sender to be the list admin. This way, bounces go to list admin instead of to -request addr. (Using the errors-to header wasn't sufficient. Thanks, barry, for pointing out the use of sender here.) Second, ignore any mailcommands coming from postmaster or non-login system type accounts (mailer-daemon, daemon, postoffice, etc.) - Reenabled admin setting of web_page_url - crucial for having lists use alternate names of a host that occupies multiple addresses. - Fixed and refined admin-options help mechanism. Top-level visit to general-category (where the "general" isn't in the URL) was broken. New help presentation shows the same row that shows on the actual options page. - cron/crontab.in crontab template had wrong name for senddigests. - Default digest format setting, as distributed, is now non-MIME, on urging of reasoned voices asserting that there are still enough bad MIME implementations in the world to be a nuisance to too many users if MIME is the default. Sigh. - MIME digests now preserve the structure of MIME postings, keeping attachments as attachments, etc. They also are more structured in general. - Added README instructions explaining how to determine the right UID and GID settings for the wrapper executables, and improved some of the explanations about exploratory interaction w/mailman. - Removed the constraint that subscribers have their domain included in a static list in the code. We might want to eventually reincorporate the check for the sake of a warning message, to give a heads up to the subscriber, but try delivery anyway... - Added missing titles to error docs. - Improved several help details, including particularly explaining better how real_name setting is used. - Strengthened admonition against setting reply_goes_to_list. - Added X-BeenThere header to postings for the sake of prevention of external mail loops. - Improved handling of bounced messages to better recognize members address, and prevent duplicate attempts to react (which could cause superfluous notices to administrator). - Added __delitem__ method to mm_message.OutgoingMessage, to fix the intermediate patch posted just before this one. - Using keyword substitution format for more message text (ie, "substituting %(such)s into text" % {'such': "something"}) to make the substitutions less fragile and, presumably, easier to debug. - Removed hardwired (and failure-prone) /tmp file logging from answer.majordomo_mail, and generally spiffed up following janne sinkkonen's lead. 1.0b2 (13-Apr-1998) 1.0b1 (09-Apr-1998) Web pages much more polished - Better organized, text more finely crafted - Easier, more refined layout - List info and admin interface overviews, enumerate all public lists (via, e.g., http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo - sans the specific list) - Admin interface broken into sections, with help elaboration for complicated configuration options Mailing List Archives - Integrated with a newer, *much* improved, external pipermail - to be found at http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/maintained/pipermail.html - Private archives protected with mailing list members passwords, cookie-fied. Spam prevention - New spam prevention measures catch most if not all spam without operator intervention or general constraints on who can post to list: require_explicit_destination option imposes hold of any postings that do not have the list name in any of the to or cc header destination addresses. This catches the vast majority of random spam. Other options (forbidden_posters, bounce_matching_headers) provide for filtering of known transgressors. - Option obscure_addresses (default on) causes mailing list subscriber lists on the web to be slightly mangled so they're not directly recognizable as email address by web spiders, which might be seeking targets for spammers. Site configuration arrangement organized - in mailman/mailman/modules: - When installing, create a mailman/modules/mm_cfg.py (if there's not one already there), using mm_cfg.py.dist as a template. mm_default.py contains the distributed defaults, including descriptions of the values. mm_cfg.py does a 'from mm_defaults.py import *' to get the distributed defaults. Include settings in mm_cfg.py for any values in mm_defaults.py that need to be customized for your site, after the 'from .. import *'. See mm_cfg.py.dist for more details. Logging - Major operations (subscription, admin approval, bounce, digestification, cgi script failure tracebacks) logged in files using a reliable mechanism - Wrapper executables log authentication complaints via syslog Wrappers - All cgi-script wrapper executables combined in a single source, easier to configure. (Mail and aliases wrappers separate.) List structure version migration - Provision for automatic update of list structures when moving to a new version of the system. See modules/versions.py. Code cleaning - Many more module docstrings, __version__ settings, more function docstrings. - Most unqualified exception catches have been replaced with more finely targeted catches, to avoid concealing bugs. - Lotsa long lines wrapped (pet peeve:). Random details (not complete, sorry): - make archival frequency a list option - Option for daily digest dispatch, in addition to size threshhold - make sure users only get one periodic password notifcation message for all the lists they're on (repaired 1.0b1.1 varying-case mistake) - Fix rmlist sans-argument bug causing deletion of all lists! - doubled generated random passwords to four letters - Cleaned lots and lots of notices - Lots and lots of html page cleanup, including table-of-contents, etc - Admin options sections - don't do the "if so" if the ensuing list is empty - Prevent list subject-prefix cascade - Sources under CVS - Various spam filters - implicit-destination, header-field - Adjusted permissions for group access - Prevent redundant subscription from redundant vetted requests - Instituted centralize, robustish logging - Wrapper sources use syslog for logging (john viega) - Sorting of users done on presentation, not in list. - Edit options - give an error for non-existent users, not an options page. - Bounce handling - offer 'disable' option, instead of remove, and never remove without notifying admin - Moved subscribers off of listinfo (and made private lists visible modulo authentication) - Parameterize default digest headers and footers and create some - Put titles on cgi result pages that do not get titles (all?) - Option for immediate admin notifcation via email of pending requests, as well as periodic - Admin options web-page help - Enabled grouped and cascading lists despite implicit-name constraint - Changed subscribers list so it has its own script (roster) - Welcome pages: http://www.python.org/mailman/{admin,listinfo}/ 0.95 (25-Jan-1997) - Fixed a bug in sending out digests added when adding disable mime option. - Added an option to not notify about bounced posts. - Added hook for pre-posting filters. These could be used to auto-strip signatures. I'm using the feature to auto-strip footers that are auto-generated by mail received from another mailing list. 0.94 (22-Jan-1997) - Made admin password work ubiquitously in place of a user password. - Added an interface for getting / setting user options. - Added user option to disable mime digests (digested people only) - Added user option to not receive your own posts (nondigested people only) - Added user option to ack posts - Added user option to disable list delivery to their box. - Added web interface to user options - Config number of sendmail spawns on a per-list basis - Fixed extra space at beginning of each message in digests... - Handled comma separated emails in bounce messages... - Added a FindUser() function to MailList. Used it where appropriate. - Added mail interface to setting list options. - Added name links to the templates options page - Added an option so people can hide their names from the subscription list. - Added an answer_majordomo_mail script for people switching... 0.93 (18/20-Jan-1997) - When delivering to list, don't call sendmail directly. Write to a file, and then run the new deliver script, which forks and exits in the parent immediately to avoid hanging when delivering mail for large lists, so that large lists don't spend a lot of time locked. - GetSender() no longer assumes that you don't have an owner-xxx address. - Fixed unsubscribing via mail. - Made subscribe via mail generate a password if you don't supply one. - Added an option to clobber the date in the archives to the date the list resent the post, so that the archive doesn't get mail from people sending bad dates clumped up at the beginning or end. - Added automatic error message processing as an option. Currently logging to /tmp/bounce.log - Changed archive to take a list as an argument, (the old way was broken) - Remove (ignore) spaces in email addresses - Allow user passwords to be case insensitive. - Removed the cleanup script since it was now redundant. - Fixed archives if there were no archives. - Added a Lock() call to Load() and Create(). This fixes the problem of loading then locking. - Removed all occurances of Lock() except for the ones in mailing list since creating a list now implicitly locks it. - Quote single periods in message text. - Made bounce system handle digest users fairly. 0.92 (13/16-Jan-1997) - Added Lock and Unlock methods to list to ensure each operation is atomic - Added a cmd that rms all files of a mailing list (but not the aliases) - Fixed subscribing an unknown user@localhost (confirm this) - Changed the sender to list-admin@... to ensure we avoid mail loops. - check to make sure there are msgs to archive before calling pipermail. - started using this w/ real mailing lists. - Added a cron script that scours the maillog for User/Host unknown errs - Sort membership lists - Always display digest_is_default option - Don't slam the TO list unless you're sending a digest. - When making digest summaries, if missing sender name, use their email. - Hacked in some protection against crappy dates in pipermail.py - Made it so archive/digest volumes can go up monthly for large large lists. - Number digest messages - Add headers/footers to each message in digest for braindead mailers - I removed some forgotten debug statements that caused server errors when a CGI script sent mail. - Removed loose_matches flag, since everything used it. - Fixed a problem in pipermail if there was no From line. - In upvolume_ scripts, remove INDEX files as we leave a volume. - Threw a couple of scripts in bin for generating archives from majordomo's digest-archives. I wouldn't recommend them for the layman, though, they were meant to do a job quickly, not to be usable. 0.91 (23-Dec-1996) - broke code into mixins for managability - tag parsing instead of lots of gsubs - tweaked pipermail (see comments on pipermail header) - templates are now on a per-list basis as intended. - request over web that your password be emailed to you. - option so that web subscriptions require email confirmation. - wrote a first pass at an admin interface to configurable variables. - made digests mime-compliant. - added a FakeFile class that simulates enough of a file object on a string of text to fool rfc822.Message in non-seek mode. - changed OutgoingMessage not to require its args in constructor. - added an admin request DB interface. - clearly separated the internal name from the real name. - replaced lots of ugly, redundant code w/ nice code. (added Get...Email() interfaces, GetScriptURL, etc...) - Wrote a lot of pretty html formatting functions / classes. - Fleshed out the newlist command a lot. It now mails the new list admin, and auto-updates the aliases file. - Made multiple owners acceptable. - Non-advertised lists, closed lists, max header length, max msg length - Allowed editing templates from list admin pages. - You can get to your info page from the web even if the list is closed. Local Variables: mode: indented-text indent-tabs-mode: nil End: