Due to a problem with the Mailman list management software, some Mailman list mail sent yesterday (December 2) and this morning (December 3) was delayed (although most was delivered normally).
We’ve resolved this. All delayed list mail has been delivered, although some messages may have arrived out of order due to the delay.
We recently upgraded Mailman to fix a problem for Yahoo and AOL users, which has worked well.
Today we found a problem where since the initial upgrade on April 24, people who tried subscribing to a Mailman list by sending an e-mail message (instead of using the more common Web interface) weren’t properly added to the list.
This was caused by an incompatibility between our mail system and one of the Mailman software changes. We didn’t receive a report of this problem until today because few people try to subscribe this way.
We’ve resolved this: Any delayed subscriptions have been correctly handled and the incompatibility has been fixed. We apologize to anyone affected by it.
In recent days, Yahoo and AOL made technical changes that prevented their own users from sending messages to most mailing lists. (That’s a simplified summary; your favorite search engine will show the gory details if you search for “Yahoo DMARC mailing lists”.)
If you use the Mailman software to run discussion lists, like many of our customers, this is a problem. To fix it, the authors of the Mailman software are making a new version to work around the Yahoo and AOL change.
That new version hasn’t been officially released yet, but we think this is so important that we’ve upgraded our installed copy of Mailman to a “pre-release” version of the fixed software.
Yahoo and AOL users should now be able to send to our customers’ Mailman lists without trouble.
We’ll be performing brief maintenance on the Web server that runs the Mailman list interface and archives tonight (June 9, 2011) between 10:00 PM and 11:00 PM Pacific time.
Between 4:58 and 5:39 AM Pacific time today (March 23), our server which runs the Mailman mailing list software encountered an internal problem. During most of this time, all Mailman-related functionality was unavailable.
Since Mailman most works via e-mail, no data was lost. Some messages might have been slightly delayed, but not for any longer than might normally be noticed with mail delivery via the Internet.
We apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused!
In response to customer suggestions, we’ve changed the appearance of Mailman invitation/address verification messages a little. Most notably, the messages now include your domain name in the subject, which should make it easier for people to recognize who you are and why you’re sending them the message.
You can see a sample on our page describing Mailman invitation messages.
We’ve been increasing our mail server capacity lately, and as a result we’ve doubled the number of Mailman messages that hosting customers can send each month. Our Silver plan now includes up to 60,000 deliveries, our Gold plan includes 120,000, and our Platinum plan includes 300,000.
More details about what’s included on each plan are always available on our plans page.
One of the features of our service is the industrial-strength Mailman mailing list manager. Mailman is a very good program in some ways (it’s built like a tank and reliably handles very large volumes of list mail, and it removes much of the drudgery of managing large lists), but it has a couple of undesirable “features”.
The most obvious is that the interface is terribly ugly (the Mailman developers are working on a big improvement to this, thankfully; just so it’s clear, we didn’t create the program, and we’re as horrified by the circa-1996 appearance as everyone else). Another problem with the program, though, is the option for “monthly password reminders”. This is a design flaw that’s being removed from Mailman, and although most of the lists on our servers don’t use password reminders, customers who do should probably turn them off now in preparation for that change.
