Omri Kalinsky writes:
Problem #1: One of my friends (who isn't tech savvy and doesn't read directions) was my guinea pig and successfully joined. The problem is he tried to send his first e-mail to the list by simply replying to the welcome e-mail, so he e-mailed my-list-request@mailmanlists.org and not my-list@mailmanlists.org. Wouldn't surprise me if others do the same thing. Is there any option to change the address the welcome e-mail comes from?
No, there is no such option.
This situation embarrasses or annoys one subscriber. If you arranged for the reply to go to the list, as he expected, it would go out to the entire list, under a confusing "Welcome to the list" subject, and would possibly induce a chain of "why am I getting 'welcome to the list' messages now?" replies. Mark Dale's suggestion of adding the "how to post" message at the top is the best idea I know of. Most modern mail clients will turn the address into a clickable link, as well.
The other has to do with the replying and the "nodupes" feature. So first, I am trying to keep the list as collaborative as possible and have people replying to messages to the whole list and not to the original sender. first_strip_reply_to is on, reply_goes_to_list is set to "This list" and from_is_list is set to "Munge From". [...] I couldn't find any combination of first_strip_reply_to, reply_goes_to_list and from_is_list to make this problem go away
There isn't one in Mailman, except anonymous list. The problem is that anyone can pretend to be Bob simply by setting their display name to Bob. Then the mailing list strips the address which might be completely unrelated to Bob, and only an email expert can detect the spoof. We judged this to be a bigger problem, as it violates the usual expectations of subscribers.[1]
To get the behavior you want from Mailman, you'll need to patch the code. As Mailman 2 is end of life we won't be patching and releasing such a feature ourselves.
and keep everyone on the list regardless of reply or reply all.
Forum software is a better choice for this kind of channel.
Steve
Footnotes: [1] We don't consider it an important problem on anonymous lists because the presumption of and need for anonymity overcomes this problem.