New potential mailman user here... one functional requirement we have that I have not been able to pin down...

• can I approve/deny subscription requests via email ?

Our situation is a large club that has a club roster already, which contains email addrs for everyone. Thus we can automate the process of approve/deny by passing an "approve XYZ" email by comparing XYZ against our list.

We have this arrangement working with Yahoogroups already (tho things get a bit flaky at times...), and while I haven't worked with a majordomo list in 10+ years, I remember it working this way too.

So far I cannot find anything in the documentation about this, and searches of the mail archives have turned up only a few indefinite things. (sorry if I'm asking recurring question #1 or if I missed something obvious, but I did attempt a thorough search). I did find:

http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers@python.org/msg00038.html http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2003-July/030023.html

The 2nd one seemed promising, so I tried to subscribe a person to a test list of mine. Mailman kicked out an email to the admin addr, and I was able to construct the group-add URL and thus "remotely" subscribe the requesting member..

http://mail.xyz.org/mailman/admin/test_xyz.org/members?subscribees=me@home.com&&send_welcome_msg_to_this_batch=0&adminpw=pwd

BUT there is (at least) one major problem with this method... it does not seem to clear out the "pending" queue... so I'm getting reminder emails to the web interface and approve this poor chap ;-) Also doesn't really cover the situation of wanting to "deny" someone's request.

If it matters, my concerns about security are much less than my concerns about functionality. Also, in this case, mailman is supplied by my host and I do not have access to modify the code (no root access). (at best could set up a forwarder to procmail to something, but that starts to seem ugly). Nor are the files of subscribers stored anywhere within my space to edit them directly (at least not that I can find).

Thanks, Mike

"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one comes from a strong will, and the other comes from a strong won't"

• Henry Ward Beecher zimmy@nc.rr.com