[Mailman-Developers] sender-based authorisation

[Mark Sapiro]

David Lee wrote:
>
>   From: a.supremo at here.dom.ain
>   To: list-1 at here.dom.ain, list-2 at here.dom.ain, ... list-10 at here.dom.ain
>
>My understanding is that to get this email straight through using the
>"Approved:" mechanism all those lists (i.e. their superset) would
>currently need to share a common password.  (I haven't seen documented the
>ability to have multiple one-per-list, "Approved:" lines.)


You are correct. The alternative is to send 10 individual posts, each
to a single list with that list's approval.


>Hence my suggestion of a person's (single) personal "sender" password into
>the overall system, entitling them to send to those Mailman lists whose
>"authorised_senders" includes them.  This might be viewed as (very
>roughly) analogous to single sign-on.


We definitely want to move towards a single 'user identity/account' per
person per site with a single authorization and multiple email
addresses and subscriptions. Quoting from the todo list
<http://www.list.org/todo.html>

# Have one account per user per site, with multiple email addresses and
  fallbacks. Allow them to subscribe whichever address they want to
  whichever list, with different options per subscription.

Given that infrastructure, it seems simple to implement the authorized
poster concept.

In the mean time, I think you could accomplish much of what you want
with a custom handler. It would need to have access to a user file
which defined the user's capabilities and posting password, but it
would be simple for it to then use some feature of the message to
validate the poster, remove the secret information and set the
approved flag in the message metadata (not the Approved: header, but
the flag that the Approved header causes to be set.)

See Mailman/Handlers/Approve.py for an example of doing approval and
see
<http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq04.067.htp>
for more on custom handlers.

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