[Mailman-developers] Re: Welcome To "CC-Mode-Announce"!

[Barry A. Warsaw]

Dan,

Mailman is fairly new, so development is continuing quickly.  If you
are really interested in discussing some of these issues, I suggest
following up to mailman-developers@python.org.  You can of course join
this list in the usual Mailman ways

    <http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers>

I hope you don't mind me CC'ing that list on this reply.  I'd like for
the wider Mailman developers audience to have a chance to respond.

>>>>> "DH" == Dan Harkless <dharkless@unitech.com> writes:

    DH> I figured out what the problem is.  Mailman does not use the
    DH> correct address.  I send my mails from a local account called
    DH> "dlh", and I masquerade as "unitech.com", so my emails
    DH> (including this one) have this line:

    DH>     Sender: dlh@unitech.com

    DH> However, my From line is set to my desired return address:

    DH>     From: Dan Harkless <dharkless@unitech.com>

    DH> Right now there *is* a dlh@unitech.com, and that's where I
    DH> found mail from Mailman, but that account will soon go away.

    DH> Mailman is doing The Wrong Thing in preferring the Sender line
    DH> (or envelope sender information) over the From line.  In these
    DH> days of POP mail boxes, people don't always send mail from the
    DH> same "account" (if such even exists) that receives it.

I have never seen Sender used in this way.  Typically Sender is used
by a MLM to point to the list owner.  Bounces will get sent to Sender, 
since the owner is the only person that can deal with such problems.
In Mailman's case, the owner is a program that keeps track of bounces
and auto-disables accounts that meet a certain threshold.

I wasn't aware that Mailman uses the Sender address when deciding
where to send replies.  I agree it shouldn't use it, and certainly not 
in preference to From: or Reply-to:

    DH> What if I had my correct email address in the
    DH> even-higher-priority Reply-To line?  Does it ignore that too?

No.  The order should be Reply-to (if present) followed by From.  The
list is currently debating whether Mailman should allow admins to
Reply-to munge at all.  We all (I think) agree it's evil, but there's
some debate as to whether list admins should be allowed to configure
it at all.

    DH> Is any of this behavior configurable?

Not by users.

    DH> Actually I was just able to unsubscribe my old email address,
    DH> harkless@unitech.com, and it didn't ask me for my password.

That's very strange.  I just tried it with my own account and it
definitely required a password.

    DH> I then re-subscribed with my new address,
    DH> dharkless@unitech.com, and it got as far as replying to the
    DH> verification email, but then I never heard back from the
    DH> server.  I tried to go to the adjustments page for my new
    DH> address and it says that user doesn't exist.

I can see that dlh@unitech.com is a member, not
dharkless@unitech.com.  I think that subscribing 3rd party addresses
(essentially what you're doing) is something that Mailman currently
doesn't support too well.  It's being worked on though.  If it's
critical I think I can manually change the subscription to dharkless.

    >> If you forget your password, don't worry, you will receive a
    >> monthly reminder telling you what all your python.org maillist
    >> passwords are,

    DH> Hmm.  That sounds pretty annoying.  It'd be nice if there were
    DH> an option to turn that off.

In practice it's not bad, but I agree.  You can always get your
password emailed to you via the Web interface.

-Barry