[Mailman-Developers] Confirmation Messages and Modified Subject Lines

[Mark Sapiro]

Brad Knowles wrote:
>
>	This should be taken to the logical conclusion.  Keep popping off 
>prefixes until something useful can be found, or you run out of data. 
>You should probably also strip out all punctuation, too.  Heck, strip 
>out all non-alphanumeric data.

I think Brad is on the right track here, but we can't strip out all non
alphanumeric characters because this is common code for all commands
sent to the list-request address and valid commands can contain '=',
passwords and email addresses.

I think the correct approach is to keep popping arguments until you hit
a valid command or run out of arguments, but there is an issue here as
well, although I think it is already an issue anyway. Here it is.

Suppose I send an email to list-request at example.com that has

 Subject: I want to subscribe to the list

and body line

 subscribe a_paswd nodigest

This is a valid subscription email, but if we strip arguments off the
subject until we hit a valid command word, we'll try to process the
command "subscribe to the list" which will fail and the failure will
cause the valid command in the body to be skipped. Of course, the same
issue currently exists if the valid command is sent in the body with

 Subject: subscribe to the list

but at least here, it is the users 'fault'.

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