[Mailman-Developers] Confirmation Messages and Modified SubjectLines

[Mark Sapiro]

Adrian Wells wrote:

>Hello all.  I recently discovered a concern with the manner in which
>Mailman handles confirmation messages with modified subject lines.
>
>Normally a confirmation message has a subject line such as:
>confirm xxx...
>
>It is understood that the subject line is not to be modified.  With all
>confirmation subscription messages there is a note sent stating as such. 
>Most recipients have no problem with this, but occasionally before a
>confirmation message reaches its final destination, a spam filter, virus
>scanner, mail server, etc will modify the subject line so it arrives
>modified in the end users' mailbox.  For example, a tag like "[BULK]" is
>added: "[BULK] confirm xxx...".  Now the end user follows the directions
>and does not modify the message BUT it's already modified.
>
>This extra text in the subject line causes problems (e.g. replies to
>confirmations are not successfully processed so an user end does not
>become a member of the list as he/she would expect).  However replying to
>a confirmation message with a prefix like "Re:" does not seem to create
>problems, for example:  Re: confirm xxx...


Actually, a single extra field such as "[BULK] confirm token_string"
should work OK, but "Re: [BULK] confirm token_string" will not work.
This is because if the subject itself is not a valid command, the
first 'argument' of the subject is removed and the remainder is tried
again, but this is only done once.

I once worked up a patch to do it up to twice to handle "Re : confirm
token_string" which you might be able to find in the archives of
mailman-users at python.org or maybe this list.


>
>Would it not be better to have Mailman search for a substring, "confirm
>xxx..."?  This would allow any prefixes to be ignored.
>
>If this seems like a reasonable change, which component of Mailman is
>responsible for this?  (still learning how Mailman operates).


The code is in the do_command() method in Mailman/Queue/CommandRunner.py

-- 
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan