[Mailman-Developers] a suggestion

Mark Sapiro mark at msapiro.net
Wed Feb 3 13:50:17 EST 2016


On 02/03/2016 09:57 AM, Nicholas Barnett wrote:
> 
> If someone in both reply to it and create a thread, well, it becomes
> very tangled as B people don't see A messages and vice versa, but
> sometimes they see messages from AB people responding to stuff they
> haven't seen. B-listers may respond along the lines of a response
> already made on list A. Confusing!

(see note below)

Cross posting is an issue that will always cause problems because there
is no single, right way to handle it. Consider an announcement to listA
and listB with ListB in ListA's regular_exclude_lists. You want this to
be a single post so members of both lists don't get duplicates. Yet, if
people receiving the post who are members of only one of the lists
reply-all their replies to the other list are non-member posts which may
be an issue. This is in addition to the confusion that you mention.


> One of our 60,000 has proposed that the original poster should post to
> the two lists in two separate emails, but could there be an option for
> each list moderator to select whereby if one addressee of a post is a
> list, then other addressees may not be? It would be bounced! (And the
> option should be the default, of course, so you'd need to opt out to
> allow multiple lists as addressees, and create tangled threads)?


Not allowing cross posting is a social issue. It can be enforced
partially, but not completely reliably within Mailman. First of all,
Cross posting with many of the issues you raise occurs with posts to
lists that may be in different Mailman installations or even among lists
not all of which are Mailman managed lists. Also, even with posts to
multiple lists in the same installation, if Bcc's and aliases are
allowed, Mailman can't always know if another list in the installation
is a recipient of the post or not.

I think you can do as well as can be done with the following settings in
current Mailman 2.1. In Privacy options... -> Recipient filters for each
list, set require_explicit_destination to Yes (this is already the
distribution default) and set max_num_recipients to 2 (you can make this
the default by setting DEFAULT_MAX_NUM_RECIPIENTS = 2 in mm_cfg.py).

This will say that for a post to this list to not be held for
moderation, it must explicitly address this list and must have no other
explicit addressees (i.e. total addressees < 2).

Of course, this will preclude addressing other, non-list recipients in
list posts unless they are Bcc'd, and will undoubtedly cause confusion
of a different kind.

If you post this to the mailman-users at python.org list, you will reach a
wider audience and may get more information about how other
installations deal with this issue.

note: For the lists that I'm on, I see the opposite problem. People top
post and quote entire threads, so the issue isn't people seeing replies
to stuff they haven't seen, it's digests and archives being polluted
with multiple copies of quoted and requoted material.

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


More information about the Mailman-Developers mailing list