[Mailman-Developers] Delivering messages to scripts/post

[Jesper Jensen]

We have been running Mailman on Windows for about two weeks now and most 
things seem to work very well.
To make it run I had to make some changes - all of them minor - and most of 
them related to opening files ('b').
Mailmanwin (as I have named it) is probably not useful for anyone but me 
(and my company) right now; some things do not work at all (web interface, 
e-mail archive, usenet gateway, all the bin scripts) and some things are 
changed to make them better fit my needs.

I have made an "install" script doing all the work and describing all the 
changes, so it's fairly easy getting started.
I hope to get a webpage up with these things soon.

I don't expect the mailman developers to take account of any of these changes.
I fully understand and respect that this is a Linux project and would hate 
if cross platform issues in any way affected the future direction of Mailman.
Having said that, it would be nice if no module names conflicted with 
modules in the standard Python distribution (mailbox) ;)


On to the questions.

1. Delivering messages to scripts/post
I could not find any MTA for Windows (I didn't look much, though) that was 
able to get the toaddr and deliver the message to scripts/post.
Instead we are using L-soft LSMTP (we used L-soft LISTSERV before changing 
to Mailman).
LSMTP is told to save all messages (complete with all envelope header 
information) and I have made a Python script that parses each message and 
calls Enqueu with the correct parameters.

This works well, except that we have had a couple of mail loops because of 
auto-responders replying directly to the list.
So my question is, what information does a MTA look for before passing the 
message to post?
I found out that filtering out all messages with daemon and/or postmaster 
in the fromaddr is a good idea.
Are there any other "keywords" that i should know of?

2. Empty envelope fromaddr
In some messages the envelope fromaddr is empty.
Is it safe to never deliver a message with an empty envelope fromaddr to a 
list?

3. Using the envelope fromaddr or the message fromaddr
I can see that this is a Mailman setting.
What are the consequences of using only the envelope fromaddr?



Just for the record.
L-soft LISTSERV is a great product - the most solid/stable I have ever used.
We chaned to Mailman because we needed some things LISTSERV didn't have.


All the best,
Jesper.