Re: [school-discuss] Bounced messages

[Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 01:05:42PM -0700, Justin wrote:
> It's true - my focus has been more on the website.

Well, that has definitely seen some facelift since good ol' 
seul/edu days :-)  Drupal is also a nice CMS, good choice
(we use TYPO3 but Drupal was considered/runner-up).

Many people would "just" use Joomla (or even Mambo) and happily
provide enough security holes for spammers and such ilk to use...

> The suggestions are helpful, Michael - there was some talk
> about switching to mailman a long while back.

We're switching from Sympa at lists.osdn.org.ua -- historically
have been using that, and sympa 3.x was way better than mailman
1.x (partially due to mhonarc being way better than pipermail
back then) but 4.x/5.x broke things for us (Cyrillics in headers,
both encoded and 8-bit) while mailman 2.x is good enough.

> The features that you have mentioned seem to address even more
> fundamental tasks though.

Yeah.  At least currently every posting to the list results in
quite a few personal bounces from subscribed but non-valid
addresses, autoresponders etc -- in every modern system mail
goes out with envelope From: pointing to auto bounce manager
which would then send warnings to bouncing addresses and
eventually disable delivery for them.

So list administration would become a bit less burden that could
also be shared (mailman has two-tier system with list owners and
moderators who care for "everything" and e.g. bounce[r]s).

> It would be great to go forward with the suggestion, and would
> gladly accept assistance in ensuring everything is migrated
> properly

First have to finish our migration: that's what my colleague does
in his free time, and then it's pretty hard to ask him to do
another one here since he's not very much into education.

If there's a possibility to run distribution packages then much
of a setup problem should be already cared for.

> (importing the archived emails too if possible).

IIRC there were means to import mbox data.

> Right now, I don't have a lot of free time available to
> research the packages..

You could try to ask any sysadmins you know who might be willing 
to help: this particular task is quite coupled to mail relay
administration and isn't that similar to web development...

I can offer some advice (please CC: me or write offlist if needed)
but unfortunately current backlog is too large to say I can offer
real aid.

-- 
 ---- WBR, Michael Shigorin <mike@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  ------ Linux.Kiev http://www.linux.kiev.ua/