[Mailman-Developers] Re: Please stop the cross posting

[Christian Tismer]

Ken Manheimer wrote:
> 
> > This is insufficient for cross-posts which are replied to
> > from a different list.
> > I think my string.find approach is crude, simple, but exactly
> > the right thing. Forget about seldom possible missing prefixes...
> 
> You're probably right - the simpler approach would prevent alternation
> across lists from compounding the respective prefixes.  (Though the idea
> of messages alternating from list to list gives me the willies, but that's
> besides the point...-)

It basically appeared to me as bad manners to reply to 
cross-posted messages in a zig-zag. On the other hand, if somebody
is really on one list and not on the other, this is the only
way that works. That thread on XML/Zope sigs became really 
unreadable since prefixes piled up.

It seems to be hard to tackle this in a more intelligent way.
Ok, we can prevend prefixes from stacking.
But the bigger problem which hurts at the same time (See
Chris Petrilli's message) is that you get these crossposted
things twice, also.

I don't see an easy way to avoid this when cross posting is allowed.
One way would be this:

When Mailman receives a post, it can see all the recipients,
especially it can see its own hostname, with different
mailing lists. Unfortunately, the receiving process will
duplicate the message and send it to the different aliases,
one for each list. To capture this, sendmail must be intercepted
by something like procmail (just as an example) which first makes
sure that only one list gets that message.

The one list which receives the message now reads the recipient
list, and temporarily merges the user lists of the mentioned
mailing lists into one. This could make sure that you don't
get a duplicate message.

How about that?  - ciao - chris

-- 
Christian Tismer             :^)   <mailto:tismer@appliedbiometrics.com>
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