Alternatives to having a list own itself
I'm part of a group of people ("sysops") that own several lists. Because the group changes occasionally, we've created a Mailman list called "sysops@foo.com", and all of our lists are owned by "sysops@foo.com". The sysops list also receives other (non-Mailman-generated) emails.
We tried to make sysops owned by itself, but ran into problems: a spammer emailed sysops, and the mail was held for moderation. However, the "sysops post requires approval" message came from sysops-bounces and went to sysops: Mailman apparently detected a loop and didn't deliver the message (either that, or Mailman automatically rejects emails that come from a list itself?)
To be honest, we didn't investigate too deeply: we know that the sysops list works great for the most part, but doesn't work when we make it own itself. We even tried cheating by using an alias: we had "bar@foo.com" forward to "sysops@foo.com" and then made the list owned by "bar@foo.com", but Mailman figured out our trickery and somehow disallowed it.
My question: what's the best way to handle a situation like this? Have a list owned by itself or "effectively" owned by itself. An obvious hack is to run "list_members sysops" in a cron job and then dump the results into the 'owner' field, but this seems ugly, especially if you're using topics (at any given time, only a subset of sysops may decide to receive "message pending approval" type messages).
Is this the Mailman version of Russell's paradox?
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Kelly Jones wrote:
We tried to make sysops owned by itself, but ran into problems: a spammer emailed sysops, and the mail was held for moderation. However, the "sysops post requires approval" message came from sysops-bounces and went to sysops: Mailman apparently detected a loop and didn't deliver the message (either that, or Mailman automatically rejects emails that come from a list itself?)
Actually, I think that the message comes From: sysops-owner with an envelope sender of mailman-bounces (or whatever the site list is). This however is irrelevant. What happens is this notice is sent with a header
X-BeenThere: sysops@...
This header is detected when the message is received and processed for the list, and the message is discarded.
To be honest, we didn't investigate too deeply: we know that the sysops list works great for the most part, but doesn't work when we make it own itself. We even tried cheating by using an alias: we had "bar@foo.com" forward to "sysops@foo.com" and then made the list owned by "bar@foo.com", but Mailman figured out our trickery and somehow disallowed it.
Because you didn't remove the X-BeenThere: sysops@... header.
My question: what's the best way to handle a situation like this? Have a list owned by itself or "effectively" owned by itself. An obvious hack is to run "list_members sysops" in a cron job and then dump the results into the 'owner' field, but this seems ugly, especially if you're using topics (at any given time, only a subset of sysops may decide to receive "message pending approval" type messages).
Is this the Mailman version of Russell's paradox?
I don't think so. I think your alias trick will work if you make foo@example.com the owner and then process mail to foo@example.com by stripping any X-BeenThere: headers before forwarding to sysops@...
I haven't thought through the ramifications however. It's possible that this could result in a real loop. As I say, I haven't thought it through and it's possible that there are no loop scenarios, but I won't guarantee it.
-- Mark Sapiro <msapiro@value.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
At 6:43 PM -0700 2/22/07, Kelly Jones wrote:
My question: what's the best way to handle a situation like this? Have a list owned by itself or "effectively" owned by itself.
What I've done in situations similar to this, is to make the listowner list itself owned by an alias that is directly resolvable out of /etc/aliases. So, there is no loop -- owner mail for other lists goes to the listowner list, owner mail for the listowner list goes to the listmaster alias, and that's that.
-- Brad Knowles <brad@shub-internet.org>, Consultant & Author LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu> Slides from Invited Talks: <http://tinyurl.com/tj6q4>
participants (3)
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Brad Knowles -
Kelly Jones -
Mark Sapiro