Private mailing list reply watcher
Hi,
for our organization, we do host several mailing lists that serve two purposes:
- for our internal communication
- for people outside our organization to contact us
However, it sometimes happens that a person that is not a member (and thus not subscribed to the list) writes us an email and we do reply, but to the list only (by mistake), not delivering the message to the intended participant.
I plan to write a script that will handle such cases in a generic way, however, I don't like reinventing the wheel. Does anybody know if this problem has already been solved?
Thanks,
Tomas
On 04/30/2014 07:33 AM, Tomas Babej wrote:
I plan to write a script that will handle such cases in a generic way, however, I don't like reinventing the wheel. Does anybody know if this problem has already been solved?
What problem are you trying to solve? Remailing the reply from the list archive to the original sender, or something else?
From your Subject:, it seems you're looking for something that monitors list traffic and in case of a message determined to be a reply to the list with no Cc: to someone else, sends that message to the someone else, but identifying to whom might be tricky. I'd be interested in what you come up with.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
The situation (let's call it situation S) I want to detect is as follows:
1.) not-member writes to a private mailing list which serves as a contact point 2.) member writes a reply to the list (usually by hitting reply-to and not reply-all in his mail client)
Depending on the circumstances, this can be intentional or not.
- if you need to discuss the content of the non-member's message privately, it can be intentional
- if you wanted to reply to the non-member, it is not intentional (and can be easily missed, since every list member sees the email in the thread and thinks the mailing list has been cc-ed)
Since you cannot really distinguish between these two variants, my thought is to monitor the mailing list, and if the situation S occurs, have a warning message replied to the list ("Warning! This email was addressed to the mailing list only.")
My thoughts how to go with this are:
- gain access to the conferrence Mailbox, and watch it with for changes with inotify
- on Mailbox change, parse it with python script which will detect situation S and send a warning to the list
- list of the members can be extracted using list_members
Compared to integrating this with the mailman directly, this has the advantage of working with any mailing list solution (as long as list of members can be easily extracted).
Thoughts? Would anybody be interested in such tool?
On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net wrote:
On 04/30/2014 07:33 AM, Tomas Babej wrote:
I plan to write a script that will handle such cases in a generic way, however, I don't like reinventing the wheel. Does anybody know if this problem has already been solved?
What problem are you trying to solve? Remailing the reply from the list archive to the original sender, or something else?
From your Subject:, it seems you're looking for something that monitors list traffic and in case of a message determined to be a reply to the list with no Cc: to someone else, sends that message to the someone else, but identifying to whom might be tricky. I'd be interested in what you come up with.
-- Mark Sapiro mark@msapiro.net The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
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participants (3)
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Mark Sapiro -
Tomas Babej -
Tomáš Babej