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

[Greg Stein]

RDB wrote:
> ...
> 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
>...

MailMan has a "preapproved" list, but you need to add names to it
manually.

> 2. How are multiple moderators handled with MailMan?

Give the list-admin password to multiple people.

> 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?

Definitely. And it can even notify you when it does so.  Oh: it can
either delete them, or simply disable them.

> 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?

Definitely.

> 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?

Definitely. Same for unsubscribe.

> 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?

Yes and yes.

> 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...

You'll probably be more constrained by your network than your MTA.

I don't have any hard data on Mailman/sendmail using bulk vs.
Mailman/qmail.

> 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?

I don't think it handles this.

> 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?

Definitely. You can make the subscriber list: open, open to subscribers,
admin only.

> 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...

Nope.

Python is much more approachable than Majorpaino's perl, but you would
still need to do some coding to get this feature.

> 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.

It meets most, and it is certainly a **LOT** easier to hack on than
Majorpaino.

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/