Bill Catambay writes:
At 1:55 PM +0900 on 8/12/09, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
This can be done by setting up aliases as follows (pseudo-syntax, your mileage will vary):
foo-list: moderator@example.com foo-list-moderated: | mailman post foo-list
That requires modifying the mailman aliases in the MTA manually, though.
This went over my head. What does "MTA manually" mean? Does that mean it cannot be done with the web interface? Do I need to contact my ISP, or is there something I can do using my shell account access?
Working with the mail transfer agent (MTA == Postfix IIRC) cannot be done through Mailman's web interface. [If you have something like cPanel it might be possible.] To change aliases in the MTA you would need not just shell access, but root access. You may need help from your ISP in that case.
My ISP is using Mailman 2.1.11. Is that the latest? I'm guessing no, since it is currently NOT recognizing the envelope sender. This sounds like one that I'll need to contact my ISP for.
No, it is not the latest, 2.1.12 is.
Unfortunately, it looks like things don't work as you need them to, definitely not in 2.1.11, and probably not in 2.1.12. As far as I can tell from the 2.1.11 code, the envelope sender *is* recognized in the moderation module, but only as one of several possible candidates for the *author* of the message. And the From header will be preferred to envelope sender for that.
Among other things, I don't think Mailman knows who the moderator(s) is; anybody with the moderation password is a moderator. I can think of several approaches to make this work, but the only non-invasive one (ie, it restricts all changes in Mailman behavior to your lists) would require ISP intervention every time you want to change the moderator's address. Otherwise, there would need to be changes to some web templates and so on. I wouldn't like that if I were them.
It seems that if you change the reply-to to an explicit address, that both digest and non-digest members should have the same reply-to.
Sounds plausible but these things are complex. As I say, somebody more familiar with the detail needs to answer this one.
That said, the option you need is on the admin page, near the bottom. Try disabling inclusion of the "List-Post" header. If that doesn't work, disable inclusion of the "RFC 2369" headers, too.
I did both. It appears to have fixed the problem (not sure which action, if not both, resolved it).
Progress ....
A second option here is to use the Approved: header or pseudo-header. Many MUAs can be set to add these automatically, YMMV.
Could you elaborate on this?
MUA is "mail user agent", also called a "client". Most people think of it as "my mail program", but on this list that could mean the MUA, the MTA, or mailman itself, so ....
Most MUAs have a fixed set of headers which you fill in as a form in a GUI: From, To, Cc, Subject. A powerful MUA will allow you to add arbitrary headers. If this is possible, then you add a header like this:
Approved: <password>
A pseudo-header looks exactly the same, but it is placed as the very first line of the body, before any formatted text. Not all MUAs can do this, either, unfortunately, if they are forwarding a formatted (eg, HTML) mail. In either case, Mailman automatically removes the Approved header.
A third approach involves putting the approval in the subject. There was discussion of "Approved in the subject header" earlier this week or last week, check the archives. Mark provided a patch (that would definitely need intervention by your ISP). I think Mark's patch was somewhat invasive (ie, it would affect other people's lists in the same way, which your ISP might or might not like). There's also a method using a "Handler" that should work, and could be installed and configured without affecting anyone else's lists. It would require intervention by the ISP both to install the handler and configure it for you.
Both the pseudo-header and Approved in Subject are somewhat unreliable and insecure IMO, but the advantage to Approved in Subject is that all MUAs can do this. "Moderator is Sender" is of course the easiest.
All of these approaches suffer from the possibility that your moderation password could theoretically be "sniffed" on the net unless your moderator uses an encrypted channel to send mail to the list host. The "Moderator is Enveloper Sender" approach is also vulnerable, since it is easy (if you have the right tools such as a Linux workstation, or certain "unofficial" MUAs) to spoof the envelope sender. I don't want to alarm you, just to give you some information you need to compare these approaches.
- Lastly, the web archives created by Autoshare automatically created clickable HTML links for all HTML URL's in posts.
I don't think Pipermail (the default archiver bundled with Mailman) can do it at all,
Interestingly, the archives for *this* mailing list appears to have some decent formatted archives. Does this list use MHonArc?
Apparently I was totally wrong. I thought Pipermail only did that for its own links (next message, etc), but it does seem to do it for all URLs. In particular, this list does use pipermail.