[Mailman-Developers] Fwd: suggested improvement for Mailman's bounce processing

[Ian Eiloart]

--On 14 August 2006 08:46:18 -0400 Barry Warsaw <barry at python.org> wrote:

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> On Aug 14, 2006, at 5:44 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:
>
>> This thread arose because someone claimed that SubEtha didn't suck. My
>> comment was that the developers choice of auto-moderation instead
>> of SMTP
>> time rejection was a missed opportunity. It's probably easier to
>> implement,
>> and more frequently the desired behaviour for a closed list. The
>> developers' didn't seem to think SMTP time rejection was
>> desireable, and I
>> think that sucks.
>
> Certainly given sufficient hooks in the MTA, you might be able to  make
> various decisions about the acceptability of a message at SMTP  time,
> although it depends on where in the SMTP dialog you want to  hook in.

After "RCPT TO". At that point, if a person isn't allowed to post to the 
list, the best thing to do is to reject the message. Of the lists I manage, 
99% of attempts to post to the list by non-members are spam. 
Auto-moderation, as you've described, would make sense for some of the 
lists that I host.

> There's no magic in Mailman that would prevent that -- a  bit of Python
> would do the trick.
>
> It's not something I'd personally develop because by definition,
> integration is highly MTA dependent, but I'd accept contributions and
> would be willing to improve the Mailman infrastructure to make things
> easier (e.g. see some of the re-org I'm doing in the 2.2 branch to  move
> functionality out of scripts and into the Mailman package so  that 3rd
> party Python code can get to it).

One thing that would make integration easier, would be a script 
bin/may_post (or something), which takes a list name (ideally qualified 
with domain) and sender address, and returns true if the sender address is 
allowed to post, and false otherwise.


> - -Barry
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-- 
Ian Eiloart
IT Services, University of Sussex