Hi,

I am more and more frequently getting reqests for mailing lists that reach the union of members of other mailing lists (all these mailing lists are Mailman controlled).

The Mailman concept of umbrella lists doesn't quite cut it, as I find it a hack to solve a specific case -- i.e. it is not general enough. Besides, how can you (safely) set up an umbrella list to have any message inserted into some level of the hierarchy only generate _one_ request for moderator approval? Various heuristics based on looking at mail headers isn't reqally my idea of a "Good, Clean Solution" :)

Thus, my request:

Could Mailman accept some special syntax member address (being invalid in the SMTP sense) for including all members of another Mailman list (under the same Mailman installation) into this list?

I.e., if the list "all-students" has this member list:

some.supervisor@some-faculty.my.domain
another.non.student@administration.my.domain
[students-spring-1998]
[students-fall-1998]

, then the union of the regular addresses on the "all-students" list and the (recursively) expanded member list of the included lists ("students-spring-1998" and "students-fall-1998") is the real member list of the "all-students" list.

Adding these "include other list" addresses should only be possible via the admin web interface (i.e. not possible via the regular "I want to subscribe" user web interface).

The whole issue with where to send the password reminders and such would go away -- send out password reminders to members subscribed via lists that are configured to do so (and users wouldn't even have a separate password, let alone separate subscription options for lists they are indirectly subscribed to. I consider this coarse granularity a feature, YMMV).

It would also be nice if there was some provision for regulating which administrators were allowed to include what other lists into their own lists -- e.g., a first approximation could be:

If the intersection of the sets of administrators of the including
and the included lists is the empty set, disallow inclusion.

Such "privileges control" will, of course, be easier to implement as administrators get their own Mailman object (to be worked on after 1.0 is finally out the door).

So, what do y'all think?

Harald