(Ken)
Offhand, there seem to me to be two key items here:
- mailman can unequivocally identify the message id and the recipients of members of any lists which it is serving on the same host, so given a decent architecture (modularized message flow tracking db) it should be easy to provide users the option to inhibit receiving more than the first copy of a cross posted message
Well, I forgot about that. This makes it of course easy.
Um, it doesn't make sense to go external when all the info is available internally to mailman as a whole! Instead, the internal infrastructure needs to be developed - something that should go on the list for modular mailman, or whatever it'll be...
Of course! For me, identifying the message was the problem, but I should have known better. And instead of waiting for a new Mailman generation, I see that this problem has two sides: A message appears to have always an ID which is generated by the email program (not sure if that is guaranteed, but very likely). That means one could set up the sendmail (qmail, whatever) configuration in a way that it checks the incoming mail for duplicate IDs. This would also work for cross-postings to different Mailman sites. Having both would be perfect and would save bandwidth, but one suffices to yield the desired effect. Should I try to write a little filter which keeps track of message IDs for a short period, and drops those already seen? This would be a small Python tool for the email client side, not touching Mailman at all.
Looks quite practical to me. ciao - chris
-- Christian Tismer :^) <mailto:tismer@appliedbiometrics.com> Applied Biometrics GmbH : Have a break! Take a ride on Python's Kaiserin-Augusta-Allee 101 : *Starship* http://starship.skyport.net 10553 Berlin : PGP key -> http://pgp.ai.mit.edu/ we're tired of banana software - shipped green, ripens at home