
Alex Bellig writes:
I am interested in this option as well. Here is a scenario: When people send a message to the group and don't sign their name, I want their name to be picked from the membership list and mentioned at the top of the body as From: <name of the member> It will follow with their message in the body of the email.
This is not possible to do reliably in email due to the control of the relevant information by email authors. If it's merely an issue of authors forgetting, then it could be done, but Mailman provides no such feature.
So is there a variable that displays the name of the person and which template can we add it to.
No. Personalization is designed for the benefit of the *recipient*. So the variables that are available are the recipient's: their email address, their personal options page, the archive URL, and the like.
A variable identifying the sender should be unnecessary with a typically configured list. Normally, the person's name and email address are available as "From" in the email header. All mail clients display this header field by default. If they are at one of the (obnoxious) commercial services that have restrictive DMARC policies, From can be set to something like
From: "A. N. User via This Mailing List" <some-list@example.net>
and Reply-To (normally hidden by most mail clients) to
Reply-To: "A. N. User" <user@example.org>,
some-list@example.net
(where the reply-to some-list is optional, depending on whether reply_to_list is set in the list configuration). This is a compromise that avoids triggering bounces from recipients and allows somewhat convenient reply-to-author.
If you have set personalization to "full" or configured an "anonymous list", then From is set to the list. But this is rarely desirable behavior unless you want to conceal the author's identity, or it's an announcement list where the list is the author in some sense, and the identity of the human "secretary" who composed the message is unimportant. If you want help configuring your list(s) to show the original poster, we can provide that.
Much as I hate to say it, if your users need this kind of feature, you should consider migrating to a web forum instead of a mailing list. Web forums are much more helpful in this way. Mailing lists, and their developers, are biased to allowing (and requiring) their users to take care of these things themselves.
Steve