
Adrian Wells wrote:
Hello all. I recently discovered a concern with the manner in which Mailman handles confirmation messages with modified subject lines.
Normally a confirmation message has a subject line such as: confirm xxx...
It is understood that the subject line is not to be modified. With all confirmation subscription messages there is a note sent stating as such. Most recipients have no problem with this, but occasionally before a confirmation message reaches its final destination, a spam filter, virus scanner, mail server, etc will modify the subject line so it arrives modified in the end users' mailbox. For example, a tag like "[BULK]" is added: "[BULK] confirm xxx...". Now the end user follows the directions and does not modify the message BUT it's already modified.
This extra text in the subject line causes problems (e.g. replies to confirmations are not successfully processed so an user end does not become a member of the list as he/she would expect). However replying to a confirmation message with a prefix like "Re:" does not seem to create problems, for example: Re: confirm xxx...
Actually, a single extra field such as "[BULK] confirm token_string" should work OK, but "Re: [BULK] confirm token_string" will not work. This is because if the subject itself is not a valid command, the first 'argument' of the subject is removed and the remainder is tried again, but this is only done once.
I once worked up a patch to do it up to twice to handle "Re : confirm token_string" which you might be able to find in the archives of mailman-users@python.org or maybe this list.
Would it not be better to have Mailman search for a substring, "confirm xxx..."? This would allow any prefixes to be ignored.
If this seems like a reasonable change, which component of Mailman is responsible for this? (still learning how Mailman operates).
The code is in the do_command() method in Mailman/Queue/CommandRunner.py
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan