Mailman Features Request

Advanced feature discussion, beta programs and unsupported "Labs" features.
11 posts Page 1 of 2
by nordahlgrieg » Sat May 26, 2012 6:12 pm
Mailman can be configured / installed with two features that I would like to have:
1. In the "Mass Subscriptions" section of "Membership Management" Mailman can be configured to have a third option for the list: "Subscribe these users now or invite them? __Subscribe or __Invite" as well as the two options Sonic.net lists: "Send welcome messages to new subscribees?" and "Send notifications of new subscriptions to the list owner?"
The "subscribe" option does not require the user to reply to a membership confirmation email in order to finalize his/her membership in the list. This option is especially helpful for lists that are set up for the members of an organization, and several/many members join/leave the organization at once. It is also helpful when transitioning a list to a new list manager/ISP, as I am now doing. The members of my organization are mostly older, and are not sophisticated users of technology; they find the options for doing their own membership management, as listed in the emails, to be confusing. The members are experienced at using email in a "vanilla" way.
I would like to have access to this feature, perhaps in a way that is restricted to more sophisticated Mailman users (I am presuming something about myself), and protected by password access.

2. Mailman can be set up so that the emails appear to my list members as coming from "[List-Name]@<my-domain-name.org> and when a message is sent to the list, it is sent to the same address.
In the "Membership Management" section, on the "General Options" page there is a field labeled:
"Host name this list prefers for email. [lists.sonic.net]" Can I enter "[<my-domain-name.org>]" and have this feature work?

Thanks for all that you provide!
by tikvah » Sun May 27, 2012 8:32 am
Nordahlgrieg, don't hold your breath. I have tried for years to get Sonic to change that setting. They believe it opens them up to liability about spam if they allow listowners to add people to their lists. While I see that point, it's something that most sites allow, including Yahoo Groups and most other places that host Mailman. It is frustrating in the extreme to have to tell board members of the nonprofit that I am running the list for that I can't add them to their own lists. Or having to go through hoops (and lots of annoying reminders) to move subscribers from one list to another when I change hosting. Or, worst of all, doing tabling for the nonprofit or my business where people sign up to join the mailing list and yet I'm not allowed to add them, even though they asked to be added *in writing*. At best, Sonic will sometimes allow you to submit a subscription list for direct transfer to your new Sonic.net mailing list.

As for your second question, yes, I use domain names in my mailing lists and it works seamlessly. You will need to do some set up though. Go to Sonic Members Home -> Email -> Domain Email Addresses
and add the following. Substitute the appropriate things for username, yourdomain, and listname. Some are not needed but this is the list I got from Sonic a few years back. Not sure why the digest goes to the username, but this all works so...

listname-bounces@yourdomain points to listname-bounces@lists.sonic.net
listname-confirm@yourdomain points to listname-confirm@lists.sonic.net
listname-digest@yourdomain points to username@sonic.net
listname-errors@yourdomain points to username@sonic.net
listname-join@yourdomain points to listname-join@lists.sonic.net
listname-leave@yourdomain points to listname-leave@lists.sonic.net
listname-owner@yourdomain points to listname-owner@lists.sonic.net
listname-request@yourdomain points to listname-request@lists.sonic.net
listname-subscribe@yourdomain points to listname-subscribe@lists.sonic.net
listname-unsubscribe@yourdomain points to listname-unsubscribe@lists.sonic.net
listname@yourdomain points to listname@lists.sonic.net

Cyndi
by nordahlgrieg » Sun May 27, 2012 10:30 pm
Thank you Cindi for the help answering my second request, and showing in detail how to configure it.

There are eleven aliases for each List-Name, and I have six lists. So I have done two, and will do the other four tomorrow (holiday) or Tuesday.

If this all works as specified, then all the email from my lists will show the "From" and "Reply To" as coming from "List-Name@<my-domain>.org" and not from Sonic.net. So I, as the list owner, will get all the complaints from my list subscribers about any perception of "spam" and Sonic.net won't see it. Assuming I have configured MailMan correctly.

Unless I completely change how I manage the lists, and become "Egregious-Spammer@<list-name>@<my-domain>.org" in which case I will have a big problem with the falsely subscribed, and then it might well fall back on Sonic.net.

So this should make it more palatable for Sonic.net to offer the first feature that I asked for. I hope! Sonic.net are you there? Thanks!
by tikvah » Mon May 28, 2012 7:48 am
Nordahlgrieg (do you have a shorter name?), once you do the aliases (and I'm not sure they are all necessary but that's what Sonic told me years ago) AND change the domain in the preferences, then all the email to your subscribers that looked like it was FROM sonic.net will now look like it's from your domain. And people can send TO your domain instead of to a Sonic address. There is no change in what Sonic does or does not see. You can not change any email that goes to them, only what was already going to you.

These changes of domain visibility will make no difference in Sonic's decision to keep us from using the subscribe feature. Many of us listowners asking them about it repeatedly may though :-)

It's a fine line. I've had people write Sonic and accuse me of sending them spam because they joined the mailing list under their own power and forgot they had, or because they wanted to unsubscribe, couldn't be bothered to follow the directions, and were upset that I didn't do it for them when they hadn't even asked me (not nicely, not unnicely). So you know that we could have verbal confirmation or requests in writing asking to be added to the list and people will still complain now and again. I've even had people write to blast me about spamming them when I have an email from them saying "please add me to your list." The bottom line is, people are stupid. Especially about email. But taking away listowner features is not the solution.

Cyndi
by nordahlgrieg » Mon May 28, 2012 5:50 pm
Cindi,
Thanks for the response and further clarification. I thought that I needed to change the "Host name this list prefers for email." field to "<my-domain>.org", but thanks for confirming that. My original hope was that changing this field would be all that was needed, but alas...

I see my organization's members as being, for the most part, technologically unsophisticated, and so the email to complete the subscription is a bit baffling to them. The other list self-management emails are even more baffling, if they encounter them. I think that part of their problem is that there are too many options presented in the email, and it confuses them to see that there are multiple ways to do the same thing, but that they only need to do one of them. However, in a social setting, they are perfectly comfortable with navigating a great deal of ambiguity, some of which baffles me. Such is the difference between techies and socially adept people. The world needs to accommodate both types. Which brings me to my/our request that we be able to directly subscribe members without having them reply with a confirmation. Much simpler and less confusing for my non-techie members. Since the emails will come from "<my-domain>.org" and not "lists.sonic.net" I will get the first level of flack from the confused in the form of "I didn't ask for this" type of message. Only the techies will be able to figure out that "sonic.net" is in the background, and even they will sometimes forget that they did ask to be subscribed. No system will be perfect.

Thanks again!
John
by kbenson » Wed May 30, 2012 9:31 am
tikvah wrote: It's a fine line. I've had people write Sonic and accuse me of sending them spam because they joined the mailing list under their own power and forgot they had, or because they wanted to unsubscribe, couldn't be bothered to follow the directions, and were upset that I didn't do it for them when they hadn't even asked me (not nicely, not unnicely). So you know that we could have verbal confirmation or requests in writing asking to be added to the list and people will still complain now and again. I've even had people write to blast me about spamming them when I have an email from them saying "please add me to your list." The bottom line is, people are stupid. Especially about email. But taking away listowner features is not the solution.
It's not the solution, but it does give us some leverage when talking to spam list services. It's not entirely uncommon for a list server to get submitted to spam services, and it really helps when you can tell the maintainers that that it's an explicit opt-in server, and we have evidence the reporting address did just that, opt-in.

As a shared list server, we feel some obligation to keep one bad actor from ruining the service for all the rest. Having half your recipients fail to receive messages because they were silently blocked somewhere along the line because it's coming from an IP address flagged as a spam source is a much harder problem to deal with for most people than requiring new members explicitly opt-in.
by nordahlgrieg » Wed May 30, 2012 10:40 am
kbenson,

Thanks for responding.

I sympathize with your problem of getting mis-classified as a spammer. I have had my own domain name with fixed IP address for years, and have used the same email address on that domain for all of those years. Several times I have found one of my email recipients' ISP is blocking my IP address, and so my email to a friend is bounced. I'm told that most likely some spammer got one of my legitimate emails from a recipient, and used the headers as the basis for a massive spamming campaign. I don't see that there is any defense against this abuse. Mr. Egregious Spammer has, perhaps, taken over the system of one of my friends, and so to be perfectly safe from this attack, I would need to send email only to people who are running their systems in a completely secure manner, clearly an impractical requirement. Spammers make life difficult for everybody, but that is not news.

All that said, I propose that this feature (subscribe now) be made available on a limited basis to list owners who configure their lists in a way that would minimize the potential impact to Sonic.net. In particular, all lists of that list owner would need to be configured so that only the owner, plus one assistant, be allowed to post un-moderated content to the list, and the owner and assistant would moderate all messages sent from anyone. Also, the list needs to be configured to use the domain name of the list owner, as described in the postings above, by Cindi (tikvah) so that the first round of objections to being subscribed, in spite of having signed up, would come to the lists owner and moderator.

I've read as much of the documentation for MailMan that I can find without actually opening up the tarball and reading all the README files. From this, my hope is that there would be a simple configuration file that could be in the home directory of a list owner who is approved that would enable this feature for just this user, much as there are ".xxrc" files for other applications. Since MailMan is written in Python, it would be a ".xx.py" file.

Thanks for giving this your consideration.
John
by tikvah » Wed May 30, 2012 11:14 am
I would love it if Sonic had a "trusted list" of listowners who were allowed to use the features that other Mailman hosting locations allow. In fact, Sonic had at one point considered doing that, basing their decisions on which Sonic users they felt they knew well enough personally (I think it was too vague to move ahead). I don't agree with your list of criteria for inclusion (even the nonprofit's announce-only mailing list with zero discussion allowed has all 4 board members and the events director set up to post without moderation (I'm a board member in addition to the listowner)). But the idea of having criteria is a good one.

I hear Sonic on the issues involved. And the real problem seems to be the excessive power some groups have to label certain domains or IP's as "spammers" with no notification and little to no recourse. There are for sure countless spams coming from domain names that are clearly designed for spam only (and throwaway ones at that). But perhaps the majority of spam comes from (or seemingly from) very large ISPs (Yahoo, Rocketmail, AOL, etc) or is faked as coming from legitimate domains (not even talking about breached servers, just faked from addresses). Yes, some of the "anti-spam" lists do indeed do stupid things like block all email from AOL or Yahoo to their members, but anyone with sense can see this solves nothing.

I wouldn't want Sonic to get blocked (no matter how much we put the mailing lists under our private domain names, Sonic's servers are still in the headers and they are the ones who'd get blocked). I just don't see how not allowing legitimate listowners to run their lists properly (which means being able to add members who request it) is THE solution or even A solution. After all, we all get accusations of spam regardless. Especially when someone tires of being on a list they signed up for and, instead of following the directions to unsubscribe, just clicks on their ISP's "this is spam" button (some ISPs get notified when that happens then follow up on it, maddening).

Could there not be some middle ground? Yahoogroups has a limit of how many people you can add to a list per day. There must be some way to do this.

Thanks,
Cyndi
by kbenson » Wed May 30, 2012 5:21 pm
nordahlgrieg wrote: I sympathize with your problem of getting mis-classified as a spammer. I have had my own domain name with fixed IP address for years, and have used the same email address on that domain for all of those years. Several times I have found one of my email recipients' ISP is blocking my IP address, and so my email to a friend is bounced. I'm told that most likely some spammer got one of my legitimate emails from a recipient, and used the headers as the basis for a massive spamming campaign. I don't see that there is any defense against this abuse. Mr. Egregious Spammer has, perhaps, taken over the system of one of my friends, and so to be perfectly safe from this attack, I would need to send email only to people who are running their systems in a completely secure manner, clearly an impractical requirement. Spammers make life difficult for everybody, but that is not news.
The problem is less that they forge some headers, but that they compromise account credentials and then create lists as that user and actually source spam from our list server.
All that said, I propose that this feature (subscribe now) be made available on a limited basis to list owners who configure their lists in a way that would minimize the potential impact to Sonic.net. In particular, all lists of that list owner would need to be configured so that only the owner, plus one assistant, be allowed to post un-moderated content to the list, and the owner and assistant would moderate all messages sent from anyone. Also, the list needs to be configured to use the domain name of the list owner, as described in the postings above, by Cindi (tikvah) so that the first round of objections to being subscribed, in spite of having signed up, would come to the lists owner and moderator.
This adds a non-negligible amount of maintenance and administration to the server. We would need to then track who is vetted as a trusted list admin, and additionally this forces us to make judgement calls on users, which is problematic at best.
I've read as much of the documentation for MailMan that I can find without actually opening up the tarball and reading all the README files. From this, my hope is that there would be a simple configuration file that could be in the home directory of a list owner who is approved that would enable this feature for just this user, much as there are ".xxrc" files for other applications. Since MailMan is written in Python, it would be a ".xx.py" file.
The restriction was originally made as a patch to the mailman distribution, which was maintained as we updated mailman. I'm not sure whether it's still implemented that way or there's a global setting now. In any case, it's most likely a non-trivial change.

I don't anticipate any change being made to this policy. That's not to say it's impossible, but it's very unlikely.
by redp » Sat Sep 15, 2012 9:58 am
Glad to find this thread as I've been struggling with MailMan issues for the past several days. Thought perhaps by simply selecting my own "host_name" I'd be good to go, but I'm now dealing with multiple bounce issues. Was told by Sonic that I needed to create the aforementioned email aliases, however I have a question: being as the initial confirmation email contains the dynamically generated confirmation code, e.g. "example-list-confirm+439abd622d597d1716d20d78b4bab0825bbd7cf3@list-name.com" how do you guys deal with folks who choose to confirm via direct reply to the confirmation email without the reply bouncing back to the subscriber? Obviously there's no way to create an email alias for an address that's dynamically generated so how do you sidestep this issue?
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