I'm not subscribed to mailman-users; the www.list.org front page seems to indicate that it's still OK for me to post to this list. I'll try and follow any discussion in the archives, but if people could copy me in directly I'd be most grateful.

=== Important bit ===

I'm using Mailman 1.1 to manage the announcement mailing list for a sexuality related event (Bicon 2002). This means that the list of subscribers has to be kept secure. I've switched off the ability of non-administrators to view the subscriber list. However, the web interface makes it easy to test whether a particular email address is subscribed, and to view their subscription options.

Is there a way around this? Maybe I can configure things differently, or newer versions of Mailman address this, or there's a patch?

=== Rambling discussion bit ===

Here's some elements of the way I'd love Mailman authentication to work. Please excuse the strange mix of tenses.

(1) You should need the password to see your user options page, not just to change options. This means the "forgotten my password" dialog needs to be separate; I think it belongs elsewhere anyway.

(2) Like a Unix login, you should get the same behaviour from entering an unknown email address as you do from a wrong password.

(3) If you click on the "forgotten my password" link and you never had one, Mailman silently generates you a new one before telling you the password has been mailed to you; the mail you receive tells you what happened while giving you the password.

(4) In fact, I'd prefer if Mailman usually generated my passwords. When I subscribe to a new list, I'd rather just enter my email in the box and press "submit", and get the password in the "confirm" email; or, for lists that don't ask for "confirm", in the "welcome" email. I can always change it later, after all.

I think these would be good too, but I'm not so sure.

(5) Passwords should be per-site, not per-list.

(6) Mailman-generated passwords should be more than four characters long.

If all this has been gone over a hundred times, my apologies!

__ Paul Crowley \/ o\ sig@paul.cluefactory.org.uk /\__/ http://www.cluefactory.org.uk/paul/ "Conservation of angular momentum makes the world go around" - John Clark