[TriLUG] trilug mailing list archives

[Jon Carnes]

> On Tue, 18 Jun 2002, Mike Broome wrote:
>
> >
> > Churning the names of the pages throughout the month seems like a bit of
> > an odd scheme.  Out of curiosity, what software controls this aspect?
> > mailman?  pipermail? (or is that part of mailman?)  htdig?  some custom
> > scripts?
>
> It's done by pipermail, which is a formerly separate tool that was sucked
> into mailman; so you can really consider it part of mailman.  I think it
> has to do with the threading mechanism...  since messages are added to
> threads in a random fashion, this affects the numbering.  It may also have
> to do with the fact that the tool uses the date on the message, rather
> than the actual arrival timestamp.  Due to vagarities of the Internet (and
> computers with incorrect date/time), a later-arriving message might be
> sorted earlier, if it had an earlier timestamp.

This is actually caused by Mailman using Cron instead of a real deamon.
Sometimes Mailman processes a newer message before completely queueing up
the message it is currently working on.  Mailman is stateless and when it
starts up qrunner, the program just starts running through the current list
of messages to be processed.  So you end up seeing a response to an email
before you see the original email that was posted to the list!

This is especially true on bigger lists.  There are some persistence
parameters in ~mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py that can be tweaked so that qrunner
stays up longer - so it processes mail in a more orderly fashion.

The newer version of Mailman uses a full-fledged deamon and suffers less
from this problem.  BTW: the new version is still Beta.
>
> The previous months aren't completely protected, either:  I could screw up
> the May archive numbering, for example, by changing my computer's clock
> back a month and sending a message with a May date.  This would then be
> added to the appropriate May archive listings, possibly renumbering many
> other messages.  Readers, please do not test this at home.  :)

This is also set-able in Mailman's configuration.  We have TriLUG's set to
trust the email header, but we could simply toggle a configuration line in
mm_cfg.py and Mailman would use the date and time on the envelope instead.
The envelope contains the date/time that your server finally took delivery
of the message.  Some envolope information is added to the email's header by
each server that handles the message.

Jon