[Mailman-Developers] Support for X-No-Archive

[Mark Sapiro]

On 02/12/2015 12:28 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Andrew Daviel writes:
>  > 
>  > Experimentally, if I add "X-No-Archive: no" in Alpine or
>  > Thunderbird, pipermail will not archive the message,
> 
> Do you consider that a bug?
> 
> I'm not sure why anybody would use "X-No-Archive: no" in reality, I
> wonder if it's a mistake in interpreting the double negation.


As I posted earlier Mailman does not archive a message with an
X-No-Archive: header. It doesn't look at the content which could be yes,
no, empty or anything else. This is deliberate.

It does look at the content of an X-Archive: header which must be (case
insensitive) no to suppress archiving.

This is explained in the code and comments which Andrew quoted in the
same post partially quoted above

> I found it implemented in
> /usr/lib/mailman/Mailman/Handlers/ToArchive.py, viz.
>      # Common practice seems to favor "X-No-Archive: yes".  No other value for
>      # this header seems to make sense, so we'll just test for it's presence.
>      # I'm keeping "X-Archive: no" for backwards compatibility.
>      if msg.has_key('x-no-archive') or msg.get('x-archive', '').lower() == 'no':
>          return


So the experiment just confirms that the code does what it says. Given that

X-No-Archive: no

apparently does occur in the wild, if we can confirm that the semantics
of this should be 'do archive', file a bug and I'll fix it.

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