7 ms·

Mailman 3.0 to modernize mailing lists

107 points by jordigh 12y ago

golem_de 12y ago
https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/view/head:/src/mailman/model/user.py https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/vie... Line 56: _password = Column('password', Unicode)
- rspeer 12y ago
  Most of the way I'm reminded that a list I'm on uses Mailman is that it mails me my password in plain text every month. So, it's unfortunate, but it's nothing new.
  - golem_de 12y ago
    Sorry, I couldn't resist. Look on that 'user' table! Does anyone have a copy of lists.mozilla.org? hehe
    - andrewstuart 12y ago
      Can you help me understand the issue you see here?
  - rbehrends 12y ago
    As I understand it from the write-up (and a brief look at the source seems to confirm that), Mailman 3.0 does encrypt passwords by default and does not mail them out any longer. It is stored in unicode because that's what passlib hash algorithms return, not because there's an underlying plaintext representation.
    - hobarrera 12y ago
      It hashes password. Encrypting them indicates there's a way to decrypt them. Hashing, by definition, is not possible (not practical, really).
  - listic 12y ago
    If there are better mailing list software, what are they?
- gog 12y ago
  From the text: "To answer the question that at least a few dozen of you are looking for: Mailman 3 will not, by default, send you a monthly reminder that includes your password in plain text. In fact, it can't; Mailman 3 hashes passwords before storing them."
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - rbehrends 12y ago
    > But the code you are pointing out is not using hashing(&salting) at all, I'm confused. That's just the storage backend. Encryption is not handled at this layer, but at (e.g.): https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/view/head:/src/mailman/rest/users.py#L108 https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/vie...
maxerickson 12y ago
I hope that people turn on the post to list feature in the web viewer. (because there really are lot of mailing lists where the desire of the core users to stick with their own mail setup is understandable but at odds with making it easy to capture more casual contributions)
erglkjahlkh 12y ago
I am not sure about modernizing. I am all for developing core applications like mailman, but I fail to see great value in this piece of execution. Post voting is bad for fact oriented discussions, popularity is a poor indicator for the value of a post. The user interface is cramped, and hides too much of valuable information I would expect to see instantly. Also, the looks are from previous decade (looks like sf.net clone to me) and not very aesthetic. Sure, this might be a step forward nevertheless, but it is a really small one.
- JoshTriplett 12y ago
  As far as I know, those are configurable features; I'd expect any FOSS project mailing list to turn them off. One of the goals of mailman is that the same software should be able to handle either a mailing list or a forum, so that people who want the UI of a forum can collaborate with people who want to live in mutt.
- andrewstuart2 12y ago
  To me the huge step here is the RESTful API, assuming it is indeed RESTful. Having access to data that's structured naturally and less like a full-on layout document (HTML) means that any developer can trivially grab the underlying data and do whatever they want with it.
  - andrewstuart 12y ago
    You again! My alter ego. I've actually been doing quite alot of development against the Mailman 3 REST API. It's well thought out and works nicely.
kolev 12y ago
How is it any more modern than GroupServer [0], for example? I was looking for some mailing list software, mailman looked pretty dated, now it will look newer, and, yet, not modern, but I ended up using Groups.io [1] at the end. [0] http://groupserver.org/ http://groupserver.org/ [1] https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/
Afforess 12y ago
I don't think mailing lists have a future. There is no new adoption of mailing lists, newer developers (those under 30) use other forums for communication (stackoverflow, github, etc) and mailing lists will eventually just die out as the generations of developers do. I am not trying to criticize mailing lists, they definitely have a lot of advantages over some of the newer systems that have grown to replace them. Without organic growth from new developers though, mailing lists are doomed to become a relic of a distant time. To most developers, they already are.
- icebraining 12y ago
  In my opinion, as an under-30 developer myself, and I don't see neither SO nor Github replacing mailing lists for broader discussions; SO is very specifically about the nitty-gritty, and while Github issues can accommodate them to a degree, they're not as suited, in my opinion. For those of you who don't use mailing lists, what do you use instead for these discussions?
  - prawn 12y ago
    As Afforess said, forums. I used to be subscribed to a number of mailing lists maybe a decade ago, but none now. The signal:noise ratio is generally pretty terrible for anyone pressed for time.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      What makes the SnR ratio so different for forums vs mailing lists? I haven't noticed, frankly. I agree with Jeff Atwood: forum software is generally pretty terrible. The difference being that I don't find his better - the way it actively prevents people from reading offline is enough to make me extremely frustrated.
- mehrzad 12y ago
  Mailman is very popular at my college for "listservs", so that's at least one usage. They at least have a future outside of tech/programming.
dtech 12y ago
Can't wait for this. It currently might be released as a final after PyCon 2015, meaning it could be here this month. We've been waiting for this to replace our ancient ecartis manager (https://launchpad.net/ecartis https://launchpad.net/ecartis). While the UI doesn't look extremely pretty, compared to ecartis it will be like moving from 1999 to 2008 or so.
ksk 12y ago
Does anyone have any suggestions for a good GUI tool to read mailman archives? (offline usage + indexing/search)
- atesti 12y ago
  Just download the MBOX files and put them in your Thunderbird profile. Thunderbird will build an index immediately and you can use Thunderbird to process, read, search, mark those posts
- walterbell 12y ago
  On Windows, http://www.mailstore.com http://www.mailstore.com (free home edition) will archive, index and quickly search local + cloud email, from mbox, Outlook, Thunderbird, IMAP, Yahoo, Google, etc.
- feld 12y ago
  Download the archives and import into your personal email and use whichever email client you prefer.
jordigh 12y ago
There is also dlang's forum software: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed It really is a web interface to mailing lists and NNTP (NNTP!!). And it's damn fast. Flies like the wind: http://forum.dlang.org/ http://forum.dlang.org/
- rando3826 12y ago
  The first link describes it as "D news aggregator, newsgroup client, web newsreader and IRC bot." I don't see anything about mailing list. And at first, I thought the D part meant that was customized to be just for the D project's uses. But thinking about it, it sounds like it's because it was written in D?
SwellJoe 12y ago
I've always liked Mailman a lot, and prefer mailing lists to web forums, but we've just recently made the decision to not enable it by default in Virtualmin (for the past 12+ years, we've enabled it on every install and made it easy for non-privileged users to create new lists and such). But, when we recently assessed how many of our customers were actually using it vs the resources it requires, we can't justify it. This new version doesn't alter the reality that very few website owners want mailing lists, anymore. But, it makes me want to start some new mailing lists (I don't currently maintain any Mailman mailing lists, though in the past I was wrangling dozens of them). The UI looks great, and the new architectural changes sound great, too. It's long overdue, though.
TD-Linux 12y ago
I don't really think it's appropriate to use LWN subscriber links on HN, by the way.
- e12e 12y ago
  FWIW LWN posts subscriber links to HN themselves from time to time, as a promotion. I'm sure they could block access to subscriber links that saw "unusual" amount of traffic -- but I guess (whether or not this was posted by LWN or not) they usually assume that the more people that read one or two free links, the more people will subscribe (like libraries leads to increase in book sales etc).
- JacobAldridge 12y ago
  I think you make a reasonable point, AND I note that there's a promotion at the top of the page. "The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider accepting the trial offer on the right. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!" It's possible (this was posted on HN 5 hours ago) that text was added retrospectively, but working on the basis that it's boilerplate text then LWN seems to figure some subscriber links will be shared AND that's OK because it's an opportunity to promote subscription to others.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  It perhaps something to be thoughtful about, but sharing the links isn't in itself inappropriate. Here's the LWN editor commenting on it, and their own posting history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689018 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=corbet https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=corbet
legulere 12y ago
When I look at this screenshot [1], it seems to suffer the same issue as LWN: After around 100 characters the text should begin on a new line, not after it filled the screen. One can complain about lots of rules designers use, but this one is actually scientifically backed up. I wonder why so many websites still do this wrong, maybe web developer tools in browsers should throw warnings? [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/638228/ http://lwn.net/Articles/638228/
reuven 12y ago
I used Mailman for more than 10 years, to run a fairly large (3,000-person) list. Before that, I had used a number of other mailing list managers. It's true that Mailman was rock solid. But it had a number of features that made it difficult for users and administrators alike. In particular, users who were not computer savvy complained bitterly that they couldn't easily search through the archives, couldn't understand how to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, and that the archives (in their repeated messages to the moderators) didn't look like the mailing lists on Google and Yahoo. In other words, it wasn't sufficient to have solid software. Mailman needed a modern UI. It took some time, but that moment seems to have come. It's a bit too late for me; for a variety of reasons (many having nothing to do with Mailman), I recently moved my mailing list to Google Groups. I'm very happy to see this new set of functionality aimed at making Mailman relevant for a new generation of users. Kudos to the maintainers for sticking with the project, and for providing a valuable service that shouldn't need to be outsourced to third parties. And for not only pushing forward with the internals, but also on the UI. It looks quite snazzy and impressive, and should help to keep Mailman relevant for many more years.
- e12e 12y ago
  To be fair, Google Groups is a terrible UI. I'm surprised about the problems they had with (un)subscribing -- the web ui has always been a controversial part of Mailman, but intended for those that think the email UI is too hard to use. FWIW I actually think it's much easier to manage subscriptions to Mailman (via the web UI) than to manage them on Google Groups. As for search and archive -- yeah, those have been in need of a facelift for a long, long time. I've been toying with doing something about them myself, but have hold off, waiting to see what Mailman 3 would ship with.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  > [...] the archives didn't look like the mailing lists on Google and Yahoo. IMHO, this is a feature, and an important one, not something bad.
Hz8NSD 12y ago
In my case, so many search result are on pipermail. So I really want to see pipermail's interface to be improved. It looks like failed. I would rather recommend http://discourse.org http://discourse.org for anyone who finding mailing list + nice web and mobile interface.

107 points by jordigh 12y ago

https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/view/head:/src/mailman/model/user.py https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/vie... Line 56: _password = Column('password', Unicode)

rspeer 12y ago
Most of the way I'm reminded that a list I'm on uses Mailman is that it mails me my password in plain text every month. So, it's unfortunate, but it's nothing new.
- golem_de 12y ago
  Sorry, I couldn't resist. Look on that 'user' table! Does anyone have a copy of lists.mozilla.org? hehe
  - andrewstuart 12y ago
    Can you help me understand the issue you see here?
- rbehrends 12y ago
  As I understand it from the write-up (and a brief look at the source seems to confirm that), Mailman 3.0 does encrypt passwords by default and does not mail them out any longer. It is stored in unicode because that's what passlib hash algorithms return, not because there's an underlying plaintext representation.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    It hashes password. Encrypting them indicates there's a way to decrypt them. Hashing, by definition, is not possible (not practical, really).
- listic 12y ago
  If there are better mailing list software, what are they?
gog 12y ago
From the text: "To answer the question that at least a few dozen of you are looking for: Mailman 3 will not, by default, send you a monthly reminder that includes your password in plain text. In fact, it can't; Mailman 3 hashes passwords before storing them."
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
- rbehrends 12y ago
  > But the code you are pointing out is not using hashing(&salting) at all, I'm confused. That's just the storage backend. Encryption is not handled at this layer, but at (e.g.): https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/view/head:/src/mailman/rest/users.py#L108 https://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mailman-coders/mailman/3.0/vie...

maxerickson 12y ago

I hope that people turn on the post to list feature in the web viewer. (because there really are lot of mailing lists where the desire of the core users to stick with their own mail setup is understandable but at odds with making it easy to capture more casual contributions)

erglkjahlkh 12y ago

I am not sure about modernizing. I am all for developing core applications like mailman, but I fail to see great value in this piece of execution. Post voting is bad for fact oriented discussions, popularity is a poor indicator for the value of a post. The user interface is cramped, and hides too much of valuable information I would expect to see instantly. Also, the looks are from previous decade (looks like sf.net clone to me) and not very aesthetic. Sure, this might be a step forward nevertheless, but it is a really small one.

JoshTriplett 12y ago
As far as I know, those are configurable features; I'd expect any FOSS project mailing list to turn them off. One of the goals of mailman is that the same software should be able to handle either a mailing list or a forum, so that people who want the UI of a forum can collaborate with people who want to live in mutt.
andrewstuart2 12y ago
To me the huge step here is the RESTful API, assuming it is indeed RESTful. Having access to data that's structured naturally and less like a full-on layout document (HTML) means that any developer can trivially grab the underlying data and do whatever they want with it.
- andrewstuart 12y ago
  You again! My alter ego. I've actually been doing quite alot of development against the Mailman 3 REST API. It's well thought out and works nicely.

kolev 12y ago

How is it any more modern than GroupServer [0], for example? I was looking for some mailing list software, mailman looked pretty dated, now it will look newer, and, yet, not modern, but I ended up using Groups.io [1] at the end. [0] http://groupserver.org/ http://groupserver.org/ [1] https://groups.io/ https://groups.io/

Afforess 12y ago

I don't think mailing lists have a future. There is no new adoption of mailing lists, newer developers (those under 30) use other forums for communication (stackoverflow, github, etc) and mailing lists will eventually just die out as the generations of developers do. I am not trying to criticize mailing lists, they definitely have a lot of advantages over some of the newer systems that have grown to replace them. Without organic growth from new developers though, mailing lists are doomed to become a relic of a distant time. To most developers, they already are.

icebraining 12y ago
In my opinion, as an under-30 developer myself, and I don't see neither SO nor Github replacing mailing lists for broader discussions; SO is very specifically about the nitty-gritty, and while Github issues can accommodate them to a degree, they're not as suited, in my opinion. For those of you who don't use mailing lists, what do you use instead for these discussions?
- prawn 12y ago
  As Afforess said, forums. I used to be subscribed to a number of mailing lists maybe a decade ago, but none now. The signal:noise ratio is generally pretty terrible for anyone pressed for time.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    What makes the SnR ratio so different for forums vs mailing lists? I haven't noticed, frankly. I agree with Jeff Atwood: forum software is generally pretty terrible. The difference being that I don't find his better - the way it actively prevents people from reading offline is enough to make me extremely frustrated.
mehrzad 12y ago
Mailman is very popular at my college for "listservs", so that's at least one usage. They at least have a future outside of tech/programming.

dtech 12y ago

Can't wait for this. It currently might be released as a final after PyCon 2015, meaning it could be here this month. We've been waiting for this to replace our ancient ecartis manager (https://launchpad.net/ecartis https://launchpad.net/ecartis). While the UI doesn't look extremely pretty, compared to ecartis it will be like moving from 1999 to 2008 or so.

ksk 12y ago

Does anyone have any suggestions for a good GUI tool to read mailman archives? (offline usage + indexing/search)

atesti 12y ago
Just download the MBOX files and put them in your Thunderbird profile. Thunderbird will build an index immediately and you can use Thunderbird to process, read, search, mark those posts
walterbell 12y ago
On Windows, http://www.mailstore.com http://www.mailstore.com (free home edition) will archive, index and quickly search local + cloud email, from mbox, Outlook, Thunderbird, IMAP, Yahoo, Google, etc.
feld 12y ago
Download the archives and import into your personal email and use whichever email client you prefer.

jordigh 12y ago

There is also dlang's forum software: https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed https://github.com/CyberShadow/DFeed It really is a web interface to mailing lists and NNTP (NNTP!!). And it's damn fast. Flies like the wind: http://forum.dlang.org/ http://forum.dlang.org/

rando3826 12y ago
The first link describes it as "D news aggregator, newsgroup client, web newsreader and IRC bot." I don't see anything about mailing list. And at first, I thought the D part meant that was customized to be just for the D project's uses. But thinking about it, it sounds like it's because it was written in D?

SwellJoe 12y ago

I've always liked Mailman a lot, and prefer mailing lists to web forums, but we've just recently made the decision to not enable it by default in Virtualmin (for the past 12+ years, we've enabled it on every install and made it easy for non-privileged users to create new lists and such). But, when we recently assessed how many of our customers were actually using it vs the resources it requires, we can't justify it. This new version doesn't alter the reality that very few website owners want mailing lists, anymore. But, it makes me want to start some new mailing lists (I don't currently maintain any Mailman mailing lists, though in the past I was wrangling dozens of them). The UI looks great, and the new architectural changes sound great, too. It's long overdue, though.

TD-Linux 12y ago

I don't really think it's appropriate to use LWN subscriber links on HN, by the way.

e12e 12y ago
FWIW LWN posts subscriber links to HN themselves from time to time, as a promotion. I'm sure they could block access to subscriber links that saw "unusual" amount of traffic -- but I guess (whether or not this was posted by LWN or not) they usually assume that the more people that read one or two free links, the more people will subscribe (like libraries leads to increase in book sales etc).
JacobAldridge 12y ago
I think you make a reasonable point, AND I note that there's a promotion at the top of the page. "The following subscription-only content has been made available to you by an LWN subscriber. Thousands of subscribers depend on LWN for the best news from the Linux and free software communities. If you enjoy this article, please consider accepting the trial offer on the right. Thank you for visiting LWN.net!" It's possible (this was posted on HN 5 hours ago) that text was added retrospectively, but working on the basis that it's boilerplate text then LWN seems to figure some subscriber links will be shared AND that's OK because it's an opportunity to promote subscription to others.
maxerickson 12y ago
It perhaps something to be thoughtful about, but sharing the links isn't in itself inappropriate. Here's the LWN editor commenting on it, and their own posting history: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5689018 https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=corbet https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=corbet

legulere 12y ago

When I look at this screenshot [1], it seems to suffer the same issue as LWN: After around 100 characters the text should begin on a new line, not after it filled the screen. One can complain about lots of rules designers use, but this one is actually scientifically backed up. I wonder why so many websites still do this wrong, maybe web developer tools in browsers should throw warnings? [1] http://lwn.net/Articles/638228/ http://lwn.net/Articles/638228/

reuven 12y ago

I used Mailman for more than 10 years, to run a fairly large (3,000-person) list. Before that, I had used a number of other mailing list managers. It's true that Mailman was rock solid. But it had a number of features that made it difficult for users and administrators alike. In particular, users who were not computer savvy complained bitterly that they couldn't easily search through the archives, couldn't understand how to subscribe and unsubscribe themselves, and that the archives (in their repeated messages to the moderators) didn't look like the mailing lists on Google and Yahoo. In other words, it wasn't sufficient to have solid software. Mailman needed a modern UI. It took some time, but that moment seems to have come. It's a bit too late for me; for a variety of reasons (many having nothing to do with Mailman), I recently moved my mailing list to Google Groups. I'm very happy to see this new set of functionality aimed at making Mailman relevant for a new generation of users. Kudos to the maintainers for sticking with the project, and for providing a valuable service that shouldn't need to be outsourced to third parties. And for not only pushing forward with the internals, but also on the UI. It looks quite snazzy and impressive, and should help to keep Mailman relevant for many more years.

e12e 12y ago
To be fair, Google Groups is a terrible UI. I'm surprised about the problems they had with (un)subscribing -- the web ui has always been a controversial part of Mailman, but intended for those that think the email UI is too hard to use. FWIW I actually think it's much easier to manage subscriptions to Mailman (via the web UI) than to manage them on Google Groups. As for search and archive -- yeah, those have been in need of a facelift for a long, long time. I've been toying with doing something about them myself, but have hold off, waiting to see what Mailman 3 would ship with.
hobarrera 12y ago
> [...] the archives didn't look like the mailing lists on Google and Yahoo. IMHO, this is a feature, and an important one, not something bad.

Hz8NSD 12y ago

In my case, so many search result are on pipermail. So I really want to see pipermail's interface to be improved. It looks like failed. I would rather recommend http://discourse.org http://discourse.org for anyone who finding mailing list + nice web and mobile interface.