[Mailman-developers] Web page

[Ken Manheimer]

On Fri, 1 May 1998, Mr. + Ms. John Viega wrote:

> On Fri, May 01, 1998 at 05:26:54PM -0400, Roy Smith wrote:
> > Not sure if it does this already, but here's my biggest mailing list
> > headache...
> > 
> > We have our lists (run under majordomo, which we want to get rid of) set up
> > that if you're not subscribed, you can't submit.  This is the most obvious
> > anti-spam measure, and goes a good way towards cutting down abuse.  Problem
> > is, people have multiple email addresses, or they change, or one MUA formats
> > is slightly differently than another MUA they use, etc.
> > 
> > It would be really cool to be able to say something like "accept postings
> > from this person, if any of the following are on the From: line"
> 
> Yes, both things are in Mailman:
> 
> You can set an option that restricts non-members from posting (their
> posts get set aside for approval).
> 
> You can list people from whom mail is always accepted without question.
> 
> I don't think these two features have any sort of negative interaction.

I agree with roy that this feature would be useful(*).  Use of the
always-accepted list of addresses for this purpose doesn't quite cut it
for me - it requires list-administrator intervention for what really is
a user-specific option.  I could imagine on a big list, with lots of
subscriptions happening all the time, the list admin would be kept too
busy just adding the always-accepted addrs.  I suspect this will be
another job for the much anticipated (:-) user profiles.

((*) I must say, the require_explicit_destination option seems to be a
remarkably effective spam filter.  I sometimes want to advertise it
heavily (not via spam:), but then think that if everyone in the world
were using it the spammers would concentrate more on the bulk mailers
that specify the destinations in the headers, so i don't harp on it too
much...)

ken manheimer
klm@python.org