[Mailman-Users] Mailman questions (moderation capabilities, mostly)

[RDB]

Hello.  I manage an electronic discussion list (with about 1700
subscribers, which sends out about 60-80 messages or so a day to each)
which is currently being run on CREN ListProc 8.  Unfortunately, we need to
be able to switch this mailing list to some sort of moderated arrangement,
as the off-topic posting and flaming by newbies has become unmanageable.
ListProc 8's "moderation" capabilities are frankly pathetic, and we're
investigating other possibilities.  I hope you don't mind but I have a few
questions about MailMan's moderation capabilities (and a few other
capabilities):

1. We would like to have a semi-moderated arrangement where the first post
from a new subscriber (subscriptions will be completely open) will go to a
moderator.  If this post is approved, then this subscriber is added to a
"pre-approve" list so that any further messages they send go directly to
the list without passing through moderation.  The attitude we are taking is
that the regular posters on our mailing list don't cause problems, and we
don't want their posts to be delayed by requiring moderator approval just
to catch the few fools who happen to pop up.  This is the same arrangement
that many moderated Usenet discussions groups use (i.e.
soc.sexuality.general, and others).  Is it possible with MailMan?

2. How are multiple moderators handled with MailMan?

3. We would very much like for subscribers whose mail starts bouncing to be
unsubscribed automatically.  Can MailMan do automatic unsubscribing of
addresses which become invalid?

4. We would like for "unsubscribe me" messages to be filtered out and not
go to the list.  Can MailMan reject messages based on whether they look
like something that should have gone to the mailing list software rather
than the list?

5. This is actually essential...  We need for our mailing list software to
send confirmation messages to people who request a subscription, so
subscriptions can't be spoofed to harass an unsuspecting person. Can
MailMan do this?

6. Can users switch freely from regular (single-message) to digest (one big
message once a day) mode freely, and back again?  Also, can we tack a
message to the bottom of every digest telling people how to unsubscribe?

7. Will we see a speed advantage if we use qmail rather than sendmail, or
is sendmail OK?  I'm asking because I seem to remember that MailMan has
some bulk mail features, and I don't know if this means it isn't necessary
to switch to qmail for speed reasons.  We're probably going to be running
this setup on Linux and Apache, for whatever that's worth...

8. It would be great if the list software didn't fail to recognize a user
just because the machine name directly following the @ in their e-mail
address was added, deleted, or changed.  Does MailMan handle this gracefully?

9. Can you protect user's privacy with MailMan by forbidding people other
than the list owner from requesting a list of the e-mail addresses of all
the subscribers?

10. Is it possible to create "anonymized" message archives automatically,
by stripping out or anonymizing the "From:" field (and, ideally, any
identical e-mail addresses that are found in the body of the message such
as in the signature) before sending the message to the archive?  I have
never seen a feature like this in another MLM packge, but I thought I'd ask...

Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated.  Our second
choice would be to hack MajorDomo so it will do all of these things, but it
would be great if another free product (such as MailMan) met all of our
needs right out of the box.

Sincerely,

Russell
rdb at blarg.net