Moderator forwarding from "announce" list to "talk" list
Here's a second question about how to set up "announce" and "talk" lists for a neighborhood group. (For the first question and answer, see http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users@python.org/msg59493.html.) Let's say the addresses of these are announce@my.group and talk@my.group.
The "announce" list is moderated. Frequently, the moderator's reason for rejecting a post is that it is an expression of opinions rather than factual information, and as such is appropriate to the "talk" list rather than the "announce" list. So the goal here is to enable the moderator to reroute the message from "announce" to "talk". Many of my users - and those who send the most inappropriate posts - are not technically savvy and not easily educated, and I have no control over their email clients or how they are configured, so a scheme that minimizes the demands on them is essential here.
Here is the only way I have found to forward messages within Mailman: On the "Posting Held for Approval" form, enter:
- Action: Reject
- Additionally, forward this message to: talk@my.group (check the check-box)
- If you reject this post, please explain (optional): <A custom message telling the sender where her post has been forwarded>
This method presents these problems:
- The "From:" address of the forwarded message, when it arrives at talk@my.group, is announce-bounces@my.group, rather than the original sender. So replies to the "talk" message will go back to announce-bounces@my.group (which sends a useless "Uncaught bounce notification" message back to the moderator), whereas the need to go back to the sender. So the question here is: How to set the "From:" (or "Reply-To:") address of the forwarded message to the address of the original sender?
- When the forwarded message shows up in a "talk" member's mailbox, its Subject: line is always "Forward of moderated message". Every word of that headline is going to be meaningless to my non-techy users! The need here is to put the original sender's original headline in the "Subject:" line of the forwarded message.
- In Outlook (2002), the body shows up as an attachment; either the header or the footer shows up as the message body. My non-techy users have barely mastered opening attachments, even when the body of the message refers to them; they're never going to find the body if it's hidden in an attachment. Gmail presents the message OK. These are the only two clients I've tried.
- If the first three problems can't be solved, a fallback possibility would be just to reject the message from announce, and put into the rejection message the suggestion that the user resend the message to talk@my.group. This would work much better for my non-tech users if their original message were attached to the rejection message, so they could just open the attachment and forward it to the suggested address. This would at least spare them from having to search in their "sent items" folder for the message to resend.
In short: The requirement here is to get inappropriate messages to "announce" forwarded to "talk" in such a way that the original sender's address and subject line appear in the "From:" and "Subject:" fields, respectively - and to do this in a way that minimizes the skills required of my user community.
~ Thanks in advance
~ Ken
Ken Winter wrote:
This is anywhere from trivial (albeit a bit cumbersome) to nearly impossible depending on your MUA (mail client).
The forwarding process actually wraps the original message as a message/rfc822 body of the forwarded message. Another way of looking at this is it attaches the original message to an empty message to the recipient.
If you forward the held message to yourself, some MUAs will allow you to open the original message, edit the To: header from 'announce' to 'talk' and resend the edited original to the talk list. Other MUAs may allow saving the message to a file which can the be edited down to the original message with the To: header changed and then resent to the talk list.
Another way to get the original message is from the notice to the admin of the held message if admin_immed_notify is Yes.
Assuming you don't have shell access to the Mailman server, all of this depends on your having some way to resend (some MUAs call it 'bounce') a message. Without that, there is no way short of modifying Mailman source code to forward a held message in the way you would want.
If you do have shell access to the Mailman server you could use a combination of sed and mailman's command line tools in a shell script to do get the held message, edit it, post it to the talk list and discard the original.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Ken Winter wrote:
This is anywhere from trivial (albeit a bit cumbersome) to nearly impossible depending on your MUA (mail client).
The forwarding process actually wraps the original message as a message/rfc822 body of the forwarded message. Another way of looking at this is it attaches the original message to an empty message to the recipient.
If you forward the held message to yourself, some MUAs will allow you to open the original message, edit the To: header from 'announce' to 'talk' and resend the edited original to the talk list. Other MUAs may allow saving the message to a file which can the be edited down to the original message with the To: header changed and then resent to the talk list.
Another way to get the original message is from the notice to the admin of the held message if admin_immed_notify is Yes.
Assuming you don't have shell access to the Mailman server, all of this depends on your having some way to resend (some MUAs call it 'bounce') a message. Without that, there is no way short of modifying Mailman source code to forward a held message in the way you would want.
If you do have shell access to the Mailman server you could use a combination of sed and mailman's command line tools in a shell script to do get the held message, edit it, post it to the talk list and discard the original.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
participants (2)
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Ken Winter -
Mark Sapiro