Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Bill Catambay writes:
Correct. The From: header should always be a member of the list (but a member whose "mod" flag is turned off). The envelope sender would be me, the moderator.
Aha. The mod flag means that the member's posts will be held for moderation, *not* that the member *is* a moderator. Moderators are identified by having the list moderator password, and in Mailman 2.1, that is the only identification of moderators. They need not be members of the lists they moderate.
The list *owner* is known to Mailman by email address. If the list owner is also the only moderator, it would be easy to make this work (but does require additional code not in Mailman 2.1.11 or 2.1.12 AFAICS).
The above is not quite correct. Each list has two attributes, owner and moderator, which are lists of email addresses, but these have nothing to do with mail approval or roles in Mailman. See the FAQs at <http://wiki.list.org/x/5YA9> and <http://wiki.list.org/x/WYA9>. Basically, those owner and moderator addresses determine who receives various notices. Owner and moderator roles are determined by knowledge of the respective passwords.
[I don't understand the random moderation behavior, so I'm going to skip it for now.]
What I'm really looking for is something to tell Mailman to look at envelope sender first, and if it's a privileged member (aka, "mod" is true), immediately deliver.
You can do this but it will require the cooperation of the Mailman host. The cooperation part is to set
SENDER_HEADERS = (None, 'from', 'reply-to', 'sender')
in mm_cfg.py. Putting None first will check the envelope sender before the From: header.
Then unmoderate the authorized envelope sender(s) and moderate everyone else.
Note that Stephen's other remarks are valid. Also, I apologize for being slow to understand the actual requirement. I confess, I only skimmed the OP and Stephen's original reply, and then got somewhat lost in the details in the follow-ups.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan