[Mailman-Developers] Auto-response Enhancement Request

[Doug Selph]

I have a request for an enhancement to auto-response processing. I use 
a mailman list for support request submission for our technical 
services team. The public can post requests to the list, while our tech 
services team makes up the list membership. I want non-members who post 
to receive an auto-response stating their message has been received and 
the request is in the queue. Blah, blah, blah. However, I want to be 
able to spare our tech services folks from the auto-responses when they 
post replies to the list, which we do for archival purposes. This seems 
like a feature that would be useful to others as well.

Would it be possible to add an option to exclude list members from 
auto-responses? I would think a good place for the config setting (in 
the web interface) would be on the /mailman/admin/listname/autoreply 
page, just under the auto-response text entry. Proposed verbiage: 
"Should Mailman exclude posts from list members from auto-response 
processing?"

I'm not a Python programmer, but I have implemented a quick hack for 
this the ~mailman/Mailman/Handlers/Replybot.py. My hack, though, 
indiscriminately imposes this behavior on all lists hosted on the 
server, without consulting any list configuration options, which is 
obviously not the *best* way to accomplish it for most sites. I'm more 
than happy to share the code changes with anyone interested, though I 
don't intend to submit it as a patch.