Mailman and Google Apps For Your Domain conflict

the recent addition of x-beenthere mail headers for Google Apps For Your Domain (gafyd)  groups stopped my mailman setup working. I thought I'd share it here in case anyone else is asking about it.

I have mailman running on server.example.com

I have example.com set up as google apps for your domain with gmail

I have a 'group' created to send mail from list@example.com to list@server.example.com

on my server I had list@server.example.com run the mailman binary with post to list whose email address is listed as list@exmaple.com

this was working perfectly however since Sep 17th 2009 gafyd is inserting x-beenthere: list@example.com which /var/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Approve.py detects as a loop and mailman mysteriously drops the message with a log in

/var/lib/mailman/logs/vette " (3902) Message discarded, msgid: ...."

the solution to me was to move the list to a non gafyd domain :(

Anonymous mailman lists

I have a need for an anonymous mailman list and here is how I set it up.

1. create the list (for me I had to run /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist the web ui didn't work for me). In this example I'm going to use the name "privatelist".
   
2. In the web ui, on the general options page, under "Hide the sender of a message, replacing it with the list address (Removes From, Sender and Reply-To fields)" select Yes
3. In the web ui under "Archiving Options" just say NO to "Archive Messages?
4. In the web ui under "Digest options" select NO to "Can list members choose to receive list traffic bunched in digests?"
5. modify /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Cleanse.py to add the following underneath if mlist.anonymous_list:

   
   del msg['received-spf']
   del msg['authentication-results']
   del msg['domainkey-signature']
   del msg['dkim-signature']

6. rm Cleanse.py[oc]
7. python -O -c 'import py_compile; py_compile.compile("Cleanse.py")'
8. python -c 'import py_compile; py_compile.compile("Cleanse.py")'
   
9. cd /var/lib/mailman/lists/privatelist; rm digest.mbox; ln -s /dev/null digest.mbox
10. remove /var/lib/mailman/archices/*/privatelist
11. replace /var/lib/mailman/archives/private/privatelist.mbox/privatelist.mbox with a link to /dev/null
12. restart mailman
    

That's what I did, post to your list with a different email address as a member and then view the message in your recipient's account. Make sure to view all headers and see if there is anything in there that might indicate the original sender. There may be something I missed, if so let me know!

Changing email address

I just changed my email address. The start of a new year seemed as good a time as any to do it. My new address is on a whole new domain which I'll only use for email and chat and calendar. There will be no web presence associated with it. I'm pretty happy with the new setup so thought I would blog about it here.

I've been a happy Gmail user since 2004 and was delighted when they allowed me to send mail as another account. I'd log into Gmail and be able to send @wtwf.com email which was cool. BUT it still had my Gmail address tied into the email headers and outlook would display all this "on behalf of" bullshit which was just plain crappy. I'd still get people replying just to my Gmail address and not to the wtwf.com address too which was a pain and my flaky net connection and power problems where my server was located meant that sometimes mail couldn't get through to me. Also it was annoying that when people wanted to chat with me they should use the Gmail address, but all anyone knew me as was the wtwf.com. Likewise for calendar invites etc... it was all too confusing.

The new mail is on a domain I own, that's privacy protected by a proxy registrar (gotta love that) and it's all handled by Google still. So I get the slick Google Gmail and calendar and talk all for free and if in the future I don't like it I can just move everything elsewhere since I own the domain. I got this all through Google's apps for your domain (GAFYD) anyone can sign up at http://google.com/a/ and if you don't have a domain they'll let you buy one right there and then (using Google checkout).
That part was easy, it's the moving everything over that was a little though. Here's the steps I took. I found it much easier to have Firefox loaded with my new account and then have safari (or any other browser) loaded up with my old account, then I didn't have to keep logging in and out.

• Gmail contacts - easy - just export to Gmail csv and then import in the new account
• Google talk buddies - hard - I just re-requested to talk to all my friends again (very annoying)
• Gmail filters - I just entered them all in again. I did notice that if I copied and pasted from the show filters page in my old account lots of weird zero width characters were added.
  
• old Gmail mail - I've downloaded all my Gmail from my old account via pop into Mozilla Thunderbird. I'm not sure how/if I'm going to upload it all into my new account it's likely I'll lose the dates of my mails. If only Google allowed POP-IN on GAFYD but they only just rolled it out for regular Gmail users. Hopefully that will get turned on soon and I can just do that. Alternatively I could use something like fetchmail to bounce it all.
  
• new Gmail mail - It's easy to set up mail forwarding from your old Gmail account to your new GAFYD one. You can even set up a vacation message to alert people to the address change, I opted to just have a small message in my signature for my new account.
  
• calendars - medium - I just added my new account as an admin on all my existing calendars. The only one I need to work on was *my* calendar which has very little in it, so I just rebuilt it.

I also wanted to make sure that I only had one identity with Google. So that meant creating a 'Google Account' for my new spangly email address and moving all my Google services over to using this new login. I never wanted to log in using my Gmail user name again. Here's the success I had with various Google services..

• blogger - I just added my new account as admin on all my blogs
• search history - I just can't work out how to move my stuff over
• bookmarks - I can't seem to move this over either
• checkout - I just entered everything again and left all my purchase history behind.
• docs & spreadsheets - like blogger, I just added my new account as a collaborator on my docs
• notebook - see blogger and docs & spreadsheets
• reader - this was easy, export all subscriptions as OPML and then import them in the new account. Painless, worked great! I unsubscribed from everything in my old account so that I wouldn't accidentally start reading stuff there.
• webmaster tools - I just added all my sites again
  

So it's not exactly been painless and they could have made it a whole lot easier but I think it's going to be worth it in the long run. I'll have one address that everyone can use for email, invites and the like. It'll be run by Google so should have much better up time than before and I still forward all mail back to my server so I have a copy on my servers (just in case).

Inject gaim logs into gmail

I love the new chat feature in gmail, and I doubly love the fact that my chat history is nicely searchable. For a while now I've wanted to import all my old chats into gmail so I can search over them too. This weekend I sat down and wrote gaim logs mailer. Gaim is an open source multi protocol chat client with god awful almost non-existent insecure password management. It takes your logs and sends them to an email address of your choice. It's driven by a config file in ~/.gaim/logsmailerrc and keeps track of which logs it's mailed so it wont mail them again. You can run this every night if you want. Here's an example logsmailerrc.

I still have three todo items for it:
- make it parse yahoo messenger client logs (which are lamely obfuscated)- make it keep a timestamp/md5sum of when the file was sent so that if more stuff gets added to the file it's resent.
- make it upload adium logs too

There is one problem:
- even though the date is correct in the email, gmail seems to index based on the date received. So you can't do before: or after: searches and find your messages.

If you use this to email your own account, and then fetch that via POP3 it might have better luck with the dates. I also heard if I send it directly to gmail using IMAP and use IMAP APPEND then gmail should preserve the timestamps:

You want to use the optional INTERNALDATE argument in order to set the
"received time" to the time of the message, assuming that's the date
problem you were having. Otherwise, you need a Date: header that is
correct for the "message time".