Path: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!usc!howland.reston.ans.net!news.cac.psu.edu!news.pop.psu.edu!barr From: barr@math.psu.edu (Dave Barr) Newsgroups: comp.mail.list-admin.software,comp.mail.misc,comp.mail.sendmail,comp.mail.smail,comp.answers,news.answers Subject: Majordomo Frequently Asked Questions Supersedes: Followup-To: comp.mail.list-admin.software Date: 28 Jun 1995 14:03:09 GMT Organization: The Pennsylvania State University Lines: 961 Approved: news-answers-request@MIT.Edu Expires: 1 Aug 1995 14:03:01 GMT Message-ID: NNTP-Posting-Host: augusta.math.psu.edu Summary: This is a list of frequently asked questions about Majordomo, a Perl-based package for managing mailing lists Xref: senator-bedfellow.mit.edu comp.mail.list-admin.software:642 comp.mail.misc:24459 comp.mail.sendmail:21718 comp.mail.smail:1788 comp.answers:12748 news.answers:47254 Version: $Id: majordomo-faq.html,v 1.74 1995/06/27 21:20:00 barr Exp barr $ Archive-Name: mail/list-admin/majordomo-faq Posting-Frequency: monthly Table of Contents: 1. What is Majordomo and how can I get it? + What is Majordomo? + Where do I get it? + How do I install it? + How do I upgrade from an earlier release? + Where do I report bugs or get help with Majordomo? + Which is better, Majordomo or LISTSERV? 2. Problems setting up Majordomo + What are the proper permissions and ownership of all Majordomo files and directories? + I get "Unknown mailer error" when majordomo runs + I get "Permission denied at ..." when majordomo runs + I get "shlock: open(">/some/path/...") when majordomo runs + A file is visible via index, but can't 'get' it + Majordomo seems to be taking many minutes to process commands + I get an error "insecure usage" from the wrapper + I get "majordomo: No such file or directory" from the wrapper + I get an error "Can't locate majordomo.pl" + I told my majordomo.cf where to archive the list, why isn't it working? + I'm accumulating lots of files called /tmp/resend.*.in and .out, + A list is visible via lists, but can't subscribe or 'get' files + I get "Out of Memory" when upgrading to 1.93 + I get warnings or errors when trying to compile 1.93's wrapper + Problems with 1.93's request-answer 3. Setting up mailing lists and aliases + How do I direct bounces to the right address? + Semi-automated handling of bounced mail + What's this Owner-List and List-Owner stuff? Why both? + How should I configure resend for Reply-To headers? + How can I hide lists so they can't be viewed by 'lists'? + How can I restrict a list such that only subscribers can send mail to the list? + Can I have the list owner or approval person be changeable without intervention from the Majordomo owner? + What about all of these passwords starting in version 1.90? + How do I tell majordomo to handle "get"-ing of binary files? + How do I set up a moderated list? + How do I set up a digested version of a list? 4. Miscellaneous mailer and other problems + Address with blanks are being treated separately + Why aren't my digests going out? + Why do I get duplicate mail sent to the list? + How do I gate my list to and/or from a newsgroup? + How can I improve Majordomo's performance? + How can I handle X.400 addresses? This FAQ is Copyright 1995 by David Barr and The Pennsylvania State University. This document may be reproduced, so long as it is kept in its entirety and in its original format. Credits: This FAQ originally written by Vincent D. Skahan. Many thanks to the members of the majordomo-workers and majordomo-users mailing lists for many of the questions and answers found in this FAQ. Thanks to fen@comedia.com (Fen Labalme) for getting an HTML version started. You can get an HTML version of this FAQ on the World Wide Web at http://www.math.psu.edu/barr/majordomo-faq.html. You can request a copy by email by sending a message to mail-server@rtfm.mit.edu, with the following text in the body: send usenet/comp.mail.list-admin.software/Majordomo_Frequently_Asked_Questions If you have any questions or submissions regarding this FAQ, send them to barr@math.psu.edu (David Barr). _________________________________________________________________ Section 1: What is Majordomo and how can I get it? WHAT IS MAJORDOMO? Majordomo is a program which automates the management of Internet mailing lists. Commands are sent to Majordomo via electronic mail to handle all aspects of list maintainance. Once a list is set up, virtually all operations can be performed remotely, requiring no intervention upon the postmaster of the list site. majordomo - n: a person who speaks, makes arrangements, or takes charge for another. From latin "major domus" - "master of the house". Majordomo is written in Perl (at least 4.036). It should also work under at least Perl 5.001a. It will not work with Perl 5.001!!! It has reportedly worked with Perl 5.000 on some but not all platforms. Perl 5.001l is the latest release from the author. However, with Perl 5 you must edit majordomo and resend to look for instances of the "@" character inside text strings "something@something". Change the "@" to "\@". The same fix is also required if you want to run Majordomo under OSF/1 on the DEC AXP systems with Perl 4 or 5. [from Jim Reisert] Many people have been having problems with DEC OSF/1 AXP systems with Majordomo. Apparently Perl on the Alphas is not as stable as compared to other platforms, and Majordomo tickles bugs in that port of Perl. If you are having problems, please make sure you are running the very latest version of Perl. If anyone has successfully gotten a recent Majordomo to work on OSF/1 on the Alpha, please let the FAQ maintainer know how. There have also been reported problems with the native compiler for AIX 3.2.5. Perl compiled with that compiler will crash when running Majordomo (even though it passes all the regression tests), however if you compile Perl with gcc it will work. Majordomo was developed under UNIX based systems, but will probably work on others. If you can get Perl to compile and run cleanly on your system, and can send Internet mail by piping or calling an external program (and that external program reads its list of recipients from a plain text file), you can probably get Majordomo to work on a wide variety of UNIX-based and non-UNIX based systems. Majordomo controls a list of addresses for some mail transport system (like sendmail or smail) to handle. Majordomo itself performs no mail delivery (though it has scripts to format and archive messages). Here's a short list of some of the features of Majordomo. * supports various types of lists, including moderated ones. * List options can be set easily through a configuration file, editable remotely. * Supports archival and remote retrieval of messages. * Supports digests. * Written in Perl, - easily customizable and expandable. * Modular in design. * Includes support for FTPMAIL. WHERE DO I GET IT? Via anonymous FTP at: ftp://ftp.greatcircle.com/pub/majordomo/ If you don't have Perl, you can get it from: ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/perl5.001.tar.gz together with the patches in ftp://prep.ai.mit.edu/pub/gnu/perl5.001.pat.gz Information about Perl can be found from: http://www.metronet.com/perlinfo/perl5.html The FTPMAIL package can be found in ftp://src.doc.ic.ac.uk/packages/ftpmail or any comp.sources.misc archive (volume 37). HOW DO I INSTALL IT? Majordomo comes with a rather extensive README. Read this file completely. This FAQ is meant to be a supplement to Majordomo's documentation, not a replacement for it. If you have any questions that this FAQ doesn't cover, chances are that it is covered in the README or other documentation in the Majordomo distribution. For anyone who is going to run a list, you must read Doc/list-owner-info before trying to do anything. If you don't have access to the system where your list is being run, the Majordomo maintainer who set up your list should have sent it to you. Bug him if he didn't. If you have permission problems unpacking the distribution, try using the 'o' flag to ignore user/group information. HOW DO I UPGRADE FROM AN EARLIER RELEASE? Be sure to browse the "Changes" and "Changelog" files to get an idea what has changed. There currently is no canned set of instructions for upgrading from an earlier release. The most straightforward method is to simply install the current release in a different directory, (with the same list/archive/digest directories) and change the mail aliases for each list to use the new Majordomo scripts as soon as you feel comfortable with the new setup. WHERE DO I REPORT BUGS OR GET HELP WITH MAJORDOMO? If you need help, there is a mailing list majordomo-users@greatcircle.com, which is frequented by lots of users of Majordomo. Report bugs to majordomo-workers@greatcircle.com. Be sure always to include which version of Majordomo you are using. You should also include what operating system you are using, what version of Perl, and what mailer (sendmail, smail, etc) and version you are using, especially if you can't get Majordomo to work at all. But first, you must have thoroughly read the ALL documentation in the Majordomo distribution and this FAQ. If you got this FAQ from the Majordomo distribution, or anywhere except from the WWW site at the top of this document don't expect it to be up-to-date. It's probably not. Please don't ask the FAQ maintainer for help on Majordomo. I will probably accidently delete your message. Let me say that about 90% of the answers I give are from the documentation or this FAQ. Most of the rest are answered by reading the source. It's really not that hard to figure out. Do NOT ask questions about Majordomo on the list-managers@greatcircle.com list. That list is for general discussions about running mailing lists, not for help on specific packages. The same goes for the Usenet group comp.mail.list-admin.policy. There is a good guide for people running majordomo lists at http://www.uchicago.edu/a.docs/Mail/majordomo.admin.html. WHICH IS BETTER, MAJORDOMO OR LISTSERV? For a good comparison of various mailing list managers (MLM's) there's a good FAQ by Norm Aleks. It is posted monthly to news.answers and comp.mail.list-admin.software. It's also mirrored at the following URL. ftp://ftp.uu.net/usenet/news.answers/mail/list-admin/software-faq You can also request a copy via email, by sending the text "get mlm-software faq" in the body of a mail message to LISTSERV@listserv.net. Contact naleks@library.ummed.edu (Norm Aleks) for more information. Section 2: Problems setting up Majordomo WHAT ARE THE PROPER PERMISSIONS AND OWNERSHIP OF ALL MAJORDOMO FILES AND DIRECTORIES? By far the biggest problem in setting up Majordomo is getting all the permissions and ownerships right. In part this is due to the security model that Majordomo uses, and it's also due to the fact that it's hard to automate this process. That's due to improve in future releases. Majordomo works by using a small C "wrapper" which works by allowing Majordomo to always run as the "majordom" user and group that you create. (note that the wrapper may disappear in a future release, since its function could safely be replaced by features found in Perl 5) You can use a different name than "majordom" for your user and group, but that is what is assumed for the explanations found in this document. Because Majordomo does not run with any "special" (root) priviliges, and because of the fact that Majordomo does a lot of .lock-style locking (with shlock.pl), permissions on all files and directories are critical to the correct operation of Majordomo. The wrapper The wrapper is compiled in one of two ways, by uncommenting the correct section in the Makefile for your type of system. If you are unsure if your system is POSIX or not, I would suggest you assume that your system is not. (The default in 1.93 is POSIX) If things don't work right (for example you get symptoms of permission problems or you get an error from the wrapper saying to recompile using POSIX flags), then try POSIX. If you are on a non-POSIX system, the wrapper must be both suid and sgid (mode 6755) to "majordom". It must not be setuid root! OR On a POSIX system the wrapper must be setuid root, and double-check that W_UID and W_GID are the uid and gid of the "majordom" user and group. Don't set W_UID to be 0! Then compile the wrapper and install it. Do not install the wrapper on an NFS filesystem with the "nosuid" option set. This will prevent the wrapper from working. Majordomo files All files that majordomo creates will be mode 660, user "majordom", group "majordom" if it is running correctly. The Log file that Majordomo writes logging information to must have this same permission and ownership. Make sure any files you create by hand (.config, subscription lists) have this same permission and ownership. (the can also be mode 664 if you don't need the contents to be private to others) The permissions/ownership of the Majordomo programs and related files themselves aren't as crititcal, but the must all be readable to the "majordom" user/group. All Majordomo programs (majordomo, resend, etc.) must have the execute bit set. Majordomo directories All directories under Majordomo's control ($homedir, $listdir, $digest_work_dir, $filedir, as defined in your majordomo.cf) must be mode 770 (or 775). They should be user and group owned by "majordom". If want to allow a local user to be able to directly modify files or for example copy files into a list's archive directory, you may make the directory or file owned by that user. However directories and files must be group-"majordom" writeable. I GET "UNKNOWN MAILER ERROR" WHEN MAJORDOMO RUNS If something is wrong with your setup, the wrapper will often exit with various return codes depending on what the problem is. In order to really understand what is going on, look at the session transcript further down in the bounce message to see the error which is returned from the wrapper or from Majordomo. You should always see some sort of error message. For information purposes, here are the current return codes from the wrapper: * 1: Usage error * 2: Insecure usage (argument to wrapper can't contain a '/') * 3: malloc() failed (out of memory) * 4: set[ug]id() failed, compile with POSIX instead of BSD flags * 5: execve() failed * >5: return code from perl [reported by Russell Street] You may also get problems when messages to majordomo are queued (for example if you change sendmail's behavior to always queue messages rather than perform immediate delivery). The problem was that if sendmail queues a message it smashes the case in command lines and addresses when the queue gets processed. This is inspite of the lines shown by mailq. This is sendmail 5.x on Solaris 2.3, but it might apply to other versions of sendmail. I GET "PERMISSION DENIED AT ..." WHEN MAJORDOMO RUNS I GET "SHLOCK: OPEN(">/SOME/PATH/..." WHEN MAJORDOMO RUNS A FILE IS VISIBLE VIA INDEX, BUT CAN'T 'GET' IT MAJORDOMO SEEMS TO BE TAKING MANY MINUTES TO PROCESS COMMANDS These are all symptoms of a permission or ownership problem. See the previous question. The directory specified of any "shlock" errors indicates a problem with that directory. A "get" problem means the ownership or permission of archive directory for that list is wrong. I GET AN ERROR "INSECURE USAGE" FROM THE WRAPPER The argument to "wrapper" should be simply be the command, not the full path to the command. "wrapper" has where to look compiled in to it (the "W_BIN" setting in the Makefile) and for security reasons will not let you specify another directory. Your alias should say for example: |"/path/to/majordomo/wrapper majordomo" I GET "MAJORDOMO: NO SUCH FILE OR DIRECTORY" FROM THE WRAPPER Make sure that the #! statement at the beginning of all the Majordomo Perl executables contain the correct path to the perl program (the default is /usr/local/bin/perl). Note many UNIXes have a 32 character limit on that path -- make sure it doesn't exceed this limit. Make sure also that majordomo and all the related scripts are in the W_BIN directory as defined in the Makefile when you compiled the wrapper. I GET AN ERROR "CAN'T LOCATE MAJORDOMO.PL" [from Brent Chapman] Majordomo adds "$homedir" from the majordomo.cf file to the @INC array before it goes looking for "majordomo.pl". Since it's not finding it, I'd guess you have one of two problems: 1) $homedir is set improperly (or not set at all; there is no default) in your majordomo.cf file. 2) majordomo.pl is not in $homedir, or is not readable. [from John P. Rouillard] 3) Note that the new majordomo.cf file checks to see if the environment variable $HOME is set first, and uses that for $homedir. Since the wrapper always sets HOME to the correct directory, you get a nice default, unless you are running a previously built wrapper, in which case you may get the wrong directory. [from Andreas Fenner] 4) I had the same problem when I installed majordomo (1.62). My Problem was a missing ";" in the majordomo.cf file - just in the line before setting homedir .... My hint for you: Check your perl-files carefully. I TOLD MY MAJORDOMO.CF WHERE TO ARCHIVE THE LIST, WHY ISN'T IT WORKING? [From John Rouillard] The archive variables in majordomo.cf aren't used to archive anything. You have to use a separate archive program, or a sendmail alias to do the archiving. The info is used to generate a directory where the archive files are being placed by some other mechanism. You are telling majordomo to look in the directory: /usr/local/mail/majordomo/archive/listname for files that it should allow to be gotten using the get command. Majordomo comes with three different archive programs that run under wrapper, that do various types of archiving. Look in the contrib directory. I'M ACCUMULATING LOTS OF FILES CALLED /TMP/RESEND.*.IN AND .OUT WHAT ARE THESE AND HOW CAN I GET RID OF THEM? This is a known bug in Majordomo 1.92. There was a typo in resend on line 347. Change the double-quotes to angle-brackets. (just like the other calls to unlink()) A LIST IS VISIBLE VIA LISTS, BUT CAN'T SUBSCRIBE OR 'GET' FILES [From Brent Chapman] I'll bet your list name has capital letters in it... Majordomo smashes all list names to all-lower-case before attempting to use the list name as part of a filename. So, while it's OK to advertise (for instance) "Majordomo-Users" and have the headers say "Majordomo-Users", the file names and archive directory names themselves all need to be in lower case. I GET "OUT OF MEMORY" WHEN UPGRADING TO 1.93 [summary of report from Matthew A. Braithwaite] There appears to be a bug in error reporting in Majordomo 1.93. Under certain circumstanses, if the directory containing your Log file is not writeable by majordomo then it will get caught in an infinite recursion, eventually allocating all the memory in the system. The fix is to make sure that the directory containing your Log file is user and group writeable, and user and group owned by your majordomo user and group. This doesn't work in all cases. There have been reports that some O/S have bugs in Perl's eval() routine causing this error. I GET WARNINGS OR ERRORS WHEN TRYING TO COMPILE 1.93'S WRAPPER You're probably trying to compile the wrapper using the default Makefile on a non-POSIX system (like SunOS 4.x). As it says in the Makefile, SunOS isn't POSIX -- you need to use the BSD rules. If you're having trouble compiling the wrapper under AIX, change the line that says: char setgroups_used = "setgroups_was_included"; /* give strings a hint */ to char *setgroups_used = "setgroups_was_included"; /* give strings a hint */ The wrapper compilation may generate warnings under Linux and SunOS, which you can safely ignore. PROBLEMS WITH 1.93'S REQUEST-ANSWER [ Summary by Yusef Pisan ] There are a some known bugs in request-answer. If you get the error 'Undefined subroutine "main'lopen"' (or "main::lopen" for Perl 5), you need to insert the line 'require "shlock.pl";' near the beginning of request-answer. The syntax of the 'do_exec_sendmail' function is different in majordomo than in majordomo.pl, so you need to change all occurences of 'do_exec_sendmail' in request-answer to something like 'do_exec_sendmail_in_request_answer'. On line 41 where it exec()'s sendmail, change the "-f$list-request" to "-f$list-approval". _________________________________________________________________ Section 3: Setting up mailing lists and aliases HOW DO I DIRECT BOUNCES TO THE RIGHT ADDRESS? You should use 'resend' to filter all messages. Make sure the "sender" keyword in the config file points to "owner-listname" and that you have defined the "owner-listname" alias to point to the owner of the list. What this does is force outgoing mail to have the out-of-band envelope FROM be "owner-listname", and thus all bounces will be redirected to that address. (Users often see this mirrored in the message body as the "From " or "Return-Path:" header). 'resend' also inserts a "Sender:" line with the same address to help people identify where it came from, but that header is not used for the bounce address. If you are using sendmail v8.x, you don't have to use 'resend' to do the same thing. You simply have to define an alias like this: owner-sample: joe, Note the trailing comma is necessary to prevent sendmail from resolving the alias first before putting it in the header. Without the comma, it will put "joe" in the envelope from instead of "owner-sample". Either address will work, of course, but the generic address is preferred should the owner ever change. However if you choose not to use 'resend', you will have to do without much of majordomo's other features like moderating, administravia checks, and others. SEMI-AUTOMATED HANDLING OF BOUNCED MAIL [From John Rouillard] Just create a mailing list called "bounces". I usually set mine up as an auto list just to make life easier. All that "bounce" script does is create an email message to majordomo that says: approve [passwd] unsubscribe [listname] [address] approve [passwd] subscribe bounces [address] The [address] and [listname], are given on the command line to bounce. The address of the majordomo, and the passwords are retrieved from the .majordomo file in your home directory. A sample .majordomo file might look like (shamelessly stolen from the comments at the top of the bounce script): this-list passwd1 Majordomo@This.COM other-list passwd2 Majordomo@Other.COM bounces passwd3 Majordomo@This.COM bounces passwd4 Majordomo@Other.COM A command of "bounce this-list user@fubar.com" will mail the following message to Majordomo@This.COM: approve passwd1 unsubscribe this-list user@fubar.com approve passwd3 subscribe bounces user@fubar.com (930401 this-list) while a command of "bounce other-list user@fubar.com" will mail the following message to Majordomo@Other.COM: approve passwd2 unsubscribe other-list user@fubar.com approve passwd4 subscribe bounces user@fubar.com (930401 this-list) Note that the date and the list the user was bounced from are included as a comment in the address used for the "subscribe bounces" command. WHAT'S THIS OWNER-LIST AND LIST-OWNER STUFF? WHY BOTH? [From David Barr] The "standard" is spelled out in RFC 1211 - "Problems with the Maintenance of Large Mailing Lists". It's here where the "owner-listname" and "listname-request" concepts got their start. (well it was before this, but this is where it was first spelled out) Personally, I don't use "listname-owner" anywhere. You don't really have to put both, since the "owner" alias is usually only for bounces, which you add automatically anyway with resend's "-f" flag, or having Sendmail v8.x's "owner-listname" alias. (while I'm on the subject) The "-approval" is a Majordomo-ism, and is only necessary if you want bounces and approval notices to go to different mailboxes. (though you'll have to edit some code in majordomo and request-answer if you want to get rid of the -approval alias, since it's currently hardwired in) So, to answer your question, I'd say "no". You don't have to have both. You should just have "owner-list". HOW SHOULD I CONFIGURE RESEND FOR REPLY-TO HEADERS? Whether you should have a "Reply-To:" or not depends on the charter of your list and the nature of its users. If the list is a discussion list and you generally want replies to go back to the list, you can include one. Some people don't like being told what to do, and prefer to be able to choose whether to send a private reply or a reply to the list just by using the right function on their mail agent. Take note that if you do use a "Reply-To:", then some mail agents make it much harder for a person on the list to send a private reply. If you are using resend, use the '-r ' flag to set the Reply-To field to the list, or use the 'reply_to' config keyword for 1.9x or greater. HOW CAN I HIDE LISTS SO THEY CAN'T BE VIEWED BY 'LISTS'? That is what advertise and noadvertise are for. The two keywords take regular expressions that are matched against the from address of the sender. A list display follows the rules: 1. If the from address is on the list, it is shown. 2. If the from address matches a regexp in noadvertise (e.g. /.*/) the list is not shown. 3. If the advertise list is empty, the list is shown unless 2 applies. 4. If the advertise list is non-empty, the from address must match an address in advertise. Otherwise the list is not shown. Rule 2 applies, so you could allow all hosts in umb.edu except hosts in cs.umb.edu. HOW CAN I RESTRICT A LIST SUCH THAT ONLY SUBSCRIBERS CAN SEND MAIL TO THE LIST? For pre-1.9x versions of majordomo, see the -I option to resend. For 1.9x this is the restrict_post keyword in the config file. Just set it to the filename that holds the list of subscribers. Unfortunately this means you probably will need help from the Majordomo maintainer in setting it if you don't have access to the host machine. This is due to be improved in a future release of Majordomo. However, there is a problem with either of these methods. Majordomo works by filtering the messages coming in through the "listname" alias, doing its dirty work, then passing the resulting message out to another alias you define like "listname-outgoing". If you trust people to not send mail directly to the "listname-outgoing" alias, then you'll be fine. If however you're not trusting, there are several steps to make sure people don't bypass the restrictions of the list. There are several methods. First you need to change your "listname-outgoing" alias such that it is not obvious. Next, you need to make it such that people can't find out what your -outgoing alias is. You can use the "@filename" directive in resend to move the command-line options of resend into a file readable only by the majordomo user/group. This will make it such that you can't find out the -outgoing address by connecting to your mailer and doing an EXPN or VRFY. The "@filename" directive seems to have fallen into undocumentation for some reason. This should be fixed in future releases. Another more direct approach is to simply disable EXPN or VRFY altogether. See the documentation for your mailer on how to do this. Sendmail 8.x will unfortunately log your -outgoing alias in the "Received:" lines. To get around this you need to specify more than one address for the list name argument to resend. The easiest way is to simply put a comma after your -outgoing address. (for example "mylist: :include:/var/lists/mylist,") For Sendmail 8.x you must not define an alias 'owner-mylist-seekrit' to be something like 'owner-mylist,' (with the commma). Otherwise sendmail will set the envelope address of outgoing mail to contain your secret outgoing alias. Finally it should be noted that it is impossible with any method to prevent people from forging mail as someone on the list, and sending to the list that way. CAN I HAVE THE LIST OWNER OR APPROVAL PERSON BE CHANGEABLE WITHOUT INTERVENTION FROM THE MAJORDOMO OWNER? Sure! Just make owner-listname and/or listname-approval be another majordomo list. (probably hidden, for simplicity's sake) WHAT ABOUT ALL OF THESE PASSWORDS STARTING IN VERSION 1.90? Think of three separate passwords: 1. A master password that can be used by both resend and majordomo contained in [listname].passwd. To be used by the master list manager when using writeconfig commands etc. This allows someone who handles a number of mailing lists all using the same password. 2. A password for the manager of this one list. The admin_passwd can be used by subsidiary majordomo list maintainers. 3. A password for those concerned with the list content (approve_passwd) This way the administration and moderation functions can be split. The original reason for maintaining [listname].passwd was to allow a new config file to be put in if the config file was trashed and the admin_password was obliterated, and may still be useful to allow a single password to be used for admin functions by the majordomo admin or some other "superadmin". Note that the admin passwd in the config file is not a file name, but the password itself. This is the only way that the list-maintainer could change the password since they wouldn't have access to the file. HOW DO I TELL MAJORDOMO TO HANDLE "GET"-ING OF BINARY FILES? Majordomo is not designed to be a general-purpose file-by-mail system. If you want to do anything more than trivial "get"-ing of text files (archives, etc) than you should get and install ftpmail. Majordomo has hooks to allow transparent access to files via ftpmail (see majordomo.cf). See the beginning of this FAQ for where to get ftpmail. HOW DO I SET UP A MODERATED LIST? First, you need to tell Majordomo that the list is moderated. In the configuration file for the list, you set "moderated = yes". If you're using Majordomo 1.9x or greater, do not try to use the now-deprecated "-A" option to resend. In fact if you're using 1.9x or greater, you shouldn't be using ANY options to resend except "-h" and "-l". Any mail which is not "approved", gets bounced with "Approval required". If the moderator wishes to approve the message for the list, then you need to tag the message as "approved" and send it to the list. The "approve" script which comes with Majordomo does this for you. If you don't have access to "approve" (e.g. you're not on a UNIX system with Perl), you have to do it by hand. The easiest way is to forward the original message to the list, add the line "Approved: approval-password" to the very first line of the body, leave a blank line, and then the contents of the original message. (meaning there should be a blank line before and after the "Approved:" line.) HOW DO I SET UP A DIGESTED VERSION OF A LIST? [ Modified from explanation given by jmb@kryten.atinc.com (Jonathan M. Bresler)] * Create aliases for the mailing list and the digest. See section 2.2 of the README for an example. * create an alias for the majordom(o) user, so that his cron generated mail comes to me, rather than just piling up in /usr/local/mail/majordom. * create the list's and the digest's files, (widget, widget-digest, widget.config, widget-digest.config, etc.). Edit the widget-digest.config file and make sure all the digest options are set to your tastes. * create the digest directory and archive directory. See FAQ section 2 on how to set permissions on all majordomo files and directories. You must have archives if you have digests so the digester can make the digest. You can purge the archive after the digest is generated. * Add yourself to both the mailing list and its digest so you can monitor what happens...at least for a while (not a bad idea to create a dummy user, and subscribe him to both the mailing list and its digest. This preserves a record of messages for debugging. Don't forget to remove this account and unsubscribe it after debugging.) * Optionally you may add a crontab for majrodom, to push out a digest at set intervals regardless of the number of queued messages. Of course you can do this from any account not just majordom, as long as the password is correct. See the question Why aren't my digests going out?". _________________________________________________________________ Section 4: Miscellaneous mailer problems ADDRESS WITH BLANKS ARE BEING TREATED SEPARATELY If a subscriber to the list is John Doe it gets treated these as the three addresses: John Doe [From Alan Millar] Majordomo does not treat these as three addresses. Apparently your mailer does. Remember that all Majordomo does is add and remove addresses from a list. Majordomo does not interpret the contents of the list for message distribution; the system mailer (such as sendmail) does. I'm using SMail3 instead of sendmail, and it has an alternative (read "stupid") view of how mixed angle-bracketed and non-angle-bracketed addresses should be interpreted. I found that putting a comma at the end of each line was effective to fix the problem, and I got to keep my comments. So I patched Majordomo to add the comma at the end of each address it writes to the list file. You can also add the $listname.strip option so that none of the addresses are angle-bracketed. (the "strip" config option for 1.90) WHY AREN'T MY DIGESTS GOING OUT? >I'm not sure how to set up the digest feature of majordomo 1.92 >to send digests out. Currently, it is digesting incoming mail, >but that's all it's doing. [from John Rouillard] echo mkdigest [digest-name] [digest-password] | mail majordomo@... This will force a digest to be created. Or you can set the max size in the digest list config file down low, and force automatic generation. There are some patches for 1.92 that will allow other ways of specifying automatic digest sending. The patch is in the contrib directory. WHY DO I GET DUPLICATE MAIL SENT TO THE LIST? I've you're running MMDF, read on: [From Gunther Anderson] Well, I can tell you what happened to me recently. We use MMDF here, which certainly colors the picture a little. What was happening here was that MMDF was verifying the validity of the whole mailing list before returning from the Submit call. The thing calling the Submit would time out and close, but the Submit itself would still be running somewhere. The calling routine would believe that the message had failed in its delivery, but the Submit would eventually succeed. The calling process would try again some time later. This, of course, is bad. The larger the list got, the more addresses there were to verify (verification was really just a DNS search on the target machine name), the more likely, under load, that the message would duplicate. We finally got so large, with so many international addresses (which seem to timeout on DNS queries much more ofen than US addresses) that we were always duplicating. Infinitely (until I killed the original submitter). The solution for us was MMDF-specific. We used a different channel for submission and delivery, one which deliberately doesn't verify the addresses before accepting a job. We used the list-processor channel, and only had to check that the listname-request name was set properly, because list-processor insists on making listname-request the envelope "From " header name. If you're running Sendmail, this is more rare. There have been unconfirmed reports that on some systems having the queue process interval set too short can cause problems, even though sendmail is supposed to handle this. Workarounds are to increase your queue process interval (-q flag), or decrease the interval between queue checkpoints (OC flag in sendmail.cf). There have been many reports from Linux users complaining about duplicate mail. The problem seems to be that flock() under Linux is broken. This may be fixed in a future release, but for now in sendmail's conf.h in the #ifdef __linux__ section add a line #define HASFLOCK 0. There are also reports that some versions of the libc have problems, and that linking with the libresolv.a from a recent BIND version will work around the problem. [ Please let me know if you have any more information --ed ] HOW DO I GATE MY LIST TO AND/OR FROM A NEWSGROUP? The easiest method is to use a program called newsgate. Send mail to rsalz@uunet.uu.net (Rich Salz) for a copy. Unless he tells you otherwise, do not redistribute what he sends you. Installation instructions are straightforward, it provides sample entires for your newsfeeds/sys file and aliases entries. The newsgate package includes news2mail and mail2news. HOW CAN I IMPROVE MAJORDOMO'S PERFORMANCE? Mail to list throughput Majordomo does very little except pass each message to the list through 'resend', and then pass it on to your mailer for distribution. Improving your mailer is the first step to improving speed of delivery of mail to the list. Upgrading your sendmail to version 8.6.x or greater will improve things greatly, as this version has a lot of enhancements which use connections more efficiently. For most lists, this is enough. Majordomo itself doesn't use very much resources except perhaps memory. Adding more memory will help if your machine does a lot of paging during mail delivery. Using other mailers instead of sendmail like ZMailer has met with varying success. If your lists are very large you may try installing bulk_mailer, by Keith Moore. It pre-sorts the list into chunks grouped by site, and passes the resulting chunks off to individual sendmail processes for delivery (see note next paragraph). Get it from ftp://cs.utk.edu/pub/moore/bulk_mailer/. It installs simply by replacing your usual -outgoing alias with (line wrapped for clarity): sample-outgoing: |"/path/to/bulk_mailer owner-sample@your.site /path/to/lists/sample" This has reportedly resulted in dramatic speedups in delivery times, on the order of several times faster. Note this works just as well on digested lists as well as normal lists. bulk_mailer does have one problem. It doesn't understand parenthesized comments in addresses, resulting in incorrect sorting and reduced performance. Either your list must be configured with strip=yes in the configuration file, or a patch has recently been submitted to the author for a -m option to strip these comments before sorting. Look for it to be incorporated soon. The restrict_post list option with large lists can cause a significant slowdown in mail delivery, since resend has to do a sequential search through the subscription list for each mail sent to the list (to verify that the sender is subscribed to the list). Think twice about using this option with very large lists. Majordomo command processing Most of the improvements in this are are experimental and not widely available or not yet completed but scheduled for future releases. Some areas include: improvements in shlock.pl to use exponential backoffs to reduce contention and starvation of locks, using some sort of dbz-style database for subscription lists to speed up subscribe and unsubscribe commands, and changes in the configuration file system to allow faster parsing and faster execution of certain commands such as "lists". If you are interested in working on improvements in this area, join the majordomo-workers list mentioned above. If you make any specific patches or additions available, please let me know so I can add references to it here. HOW CAN I HANDLE X.400 ADDRESSES? Majordomo by default treats addresses starting with "/" as "hostile", and won't let people subscribe. This is to prevent someone from subscribing a majordomo-owned filename to the list, and being able to write by sending mail to the list. Unfortunately, all X.400 addresses begin with a "/". Starting in Majordomo 1.93, there are three variables in the majordomo.cf which control how majordomo treats these sorts of addresses. See the end of the sample.cf in the Majordomo 1.93 distribution for a complete explanation.