| MAILMAN: using maillist.php as PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER [message #10868] |
Thu, 12 June 2003 16:32  |
Tobias Eigen
Messages: 85
Registered: June 2003
Location: Seattle, WA USA
Karma:
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Hi all,
I have been gratefully exploring FUD - it is a beautiful program. Many thanks for developing it and sharing it with the open source community. It will certainly help my organization to help African civil society organizations to make better use of mailing lists for networking and information sharing.
I have a suggestion for a feature that might make alot of mailman administrators happy. If it were possible to specify the list name instead of the forum topic number when running maillist.php, then we would be able to set up FUD as the Mailman archiver. This would be very slick indeed.
Mailman generates mbox archives as well as web-based archives, either with PIPERMAIL (the built-in archiver) or MHONARC. Below is the command I have set in ~mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py to use MHONARC as the private external archiver:
PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = '/usr/bin/mhonarc -add -outdir
/usr/local/mailman/archives/private/%(listname)s -rcfile
/usr/local/mailman/archives/private/mhonarc.rc -htmlext html -idxfname index.html -title
%(listname)s -reverse -spammode >> /usr/local/mailman/logs/mhonarc_private'
I'd propose to change this to something like this:
PRIVATE_EXTERNAL_ARCHIVER = '/path/to/maillist.php %(listname)s
In python, %(listname)s is replaced with the actual list name, ie. the part of the address before the @ symbol (ie. test-list for test-list(at)lists(dot)kabissa(dot)org). With this setup, I don't need to do anything special to configure mailman archives.. it simply works by default. No aliases to set up, etc.
This setup is also completely secure - nothing gets archived without going through mailman first. This means that mailman can bounce spam and moderators can reject unwanted posts so they are not archived. It's also not possible to send email directly to the archive - which the current FUD solutions all seem to make possible (ie. mail to foo-archive(at)foo(dot)org is posted to the forum automatically - not necessarily a good thing).
I don't know how FUD runs internally, but if we could specify the mailman listname in the mailing list admin interface and use it when running maillist.php, then mailman/fud integration would be pretty much seamless. An alternative would be to strip out the first part of the list's email address to get the list name.
Another angle altogether might be to emulate a slick little script I use on my qmail system called qmail-to-mailman.py. Found in the mailman /contrib directory, this script can be set up to be run via a .qmail file in a dedicated domain mailbox. It takes the message, strips the @foo.com from it to get the listname, then sends the message to mailman for handling on that list. If the list doesn't exist, it returns a helpful bounce message. Works completely flawlessly.
I'd be happy to help out in any way I can - I'm not a programmer but am happy to test out and troubleshoot.
Cheers,
Tobias
Kabissa - Space for change in Africa
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