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Listbox Service: New Version of the Majordomo Software

  J. Casas Serradilla, G. Fernandez, M. Franceschi, M. Marquina and A. Taddei IT/DCI

This article is aimed at Listbox List Owners, who may find useful this summary of the most significant improvements in this software release.

A new version of the Majordomo software (1.94.1), which is the Public Domain server software used by the Listbox Service, has been put into production on March 4th. This new version fixes a certain number of bugs, it improves the general level of the code quality and it offers some new features. Moreover, this new version allows us to integrate the CERN added value in a better way.

New features:

• Two new commands, intro and newintro, are used to retrieve and modify the introduction file that is sent only to new subscribers. This is now different from the `info' file, which (potentially) anyone can see.

• The new command cancel is an alias for unsubscribe.

• If a list owner doesn't belong to some private mailing list he administers, he can still manipulate it with an approve command:

    approve <PASSWORD> <LIST> who
  

• Many more checks for illegal addresses have been included. Users are informed (and requests rejected) when they supply only their name or otherwise supply a nonsense address.

• The response to the who command includes a subscriber count.

• List owners can define `taboo headers' and `taboo body' expressions, so that any mail sent to their list which matches any of these is bounced for approval. Global taboo headers and body are also defined, mainly to avoid mail loops in the lists.

• Subscription policy can now be set to ask the subscriber for confirmation.

• Unsubscription policy can be set independently.

• who, which, get, index, info, and intro privacy can be separately defined for each list, so that anyone, list members or nobody can use them. Any restrictions can be overridden by the `approve' command.

• Majordomo is now able to catch attempts to subscribe a list to itself.

• Majordomo is now MIME compliant.

Code improvements:

• Requests for confirmation have been made more detailed, and the backslash syntax for splitting long lines is explained in those messages.

• Confirmation messages sent by the `subscribe' command have been improved. They contain more reasons why a confirmation request may not be received.

• The locking system is much stronger.

Bug fixes:

• If a list adds its own Reply-To: header, any Reply-To: header in incoming messages will be merged with it.

• No more lists will be emptied due to faulty unsubscriptions.