On Thursday, August 7, 2003, at 04:33 pm, Chinn, Hindy wrote:

What are the do's and don'ts of list names? Limit number of characters? Can there be spaces, dashes, underscores in name?

I am not aware of any explicit length limits but I wouldn't write an essay in a list. Long list names can be inconvenient for users to type when posting etc

Mail list names have to function as valid mail aliases, as a directory name and as part of file names in the server's file system so you have several constraints to consider.

To complicate life, there is a set of mail aliases associated with any given list; for instance for the list called 'testlist' the menagerie is.

testlist testlist-admin testlist-bounces testlist-confirm testlist-join testlist-leave testlist-owner testlist-request testlist-subscribe testlist-unsubscribe owner-testlist

You want to avoid like the plague having a list whose base list name ends/begins with any of the suffices/prefixes. This will cause problems for instance if one list's -admin alias is another list's base name!

Although mail aliases are notionally case sensitive, that way lies insanity, and few MTAs will distinguish mail aliases that are differentiated by case alone. Mailman treats all list names as case insensitive and the directory/file names associated with a list in the file system and in MM's web GUI interface URI's exclusively use the lower-case version version of the list name.

Various characters other than a-zA-Z0-9 are entirely legal in mail aliases but will cause grief when used in file names. In some case they may also break code that decomposes mail aliases in a simple-minded, maybe even incompetent, way. There is little point in exploring the outer-reaches of such code's capability unless you are a masochist.

I would suggest you stick to a-zA-Z0-9 and hyphen as characters in list names.

Thanx hindy

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H I N D Y C H I N N Asst. Director of Information Technology Hillel: The Foundation for Jewish Campus Life phone: 202-449-6542 fax: 202-449-6442

Richard Barrett http://www.openinfo.co.uk