[Mailman-Users] Addresses not being held

[Greg Connor]

At 11:21 PM 3/24/99 -0500, John C. Broman, Jr. wrote:
>On the privacy page, I went to the section that's titled: "Addresses whose
>postings are always held for approval"  and I typed an address of a test
>account I have.  The address as I specified it is: xxxx at company.com.  Yet
>messages from this account are NOT being held.

At 11:36 PM 3/24/99 -0500, John C. Broman, Jr. wrote:
>I'm still having problems with setting my list to members-only.  When I set
>it to members-only, everyone's messages bounce.  This applies to members
>mass-subscribed when Mailman was installed for me as well as members who
>joined (and confirmed) after the list was running on Mailman.


A common cause for *both* of these problems is the sendmail "feature" that
rewrites the Envelope address.  This only happens IF you are sending to an
alias "mylist" AND you also have an alias defined for "owner-mylist".  

This causes Sendmail to assume that you have an "aliases mailing list", and
rewrites the sender address (in the SMTP transaction, not in the headers)
to be whatever the owner-x address is.  The idea is that if the mailing
list is made up of just aliases or :include: lists, then you want the
"owner of the alias" to get the bounces, and not the original sender.
Unfortunately this screws with REAL mailing list managers, which behave as
though ALL the messages are coming from mylist-admin (and if mylist-admin
is not subscribed, his messages typically get held for approval or bounce
or whatever).

The workaround is to undefine "owner-*" for all your Mailman lists.  I
think Mailman uses "*-owner" or "*-admin" for everything anyway, which is
fine, only "owner-*" creates a problem.  Don't forget to run "newaliases"
after you do this.

(It's kind of strange for Mailman to emit "owner-*" aliases as part of the
recommended set... this means that installing the default, recommended
Sendmail and the default, recommended Mailman leaves you in a somewhat
broken state, when all you did was follow directions.  I would prefer
Mailman not suggest owner-* aliases at all.)