[Mailman-Users] another couple mailman bugs (still 2.0beta2)

[Lenny Foner]

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Date: Thu, 6 Jul 2000 04:44:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Lenny Foner <foner at media.mit.edu>
To: mailman-developers at python.org
Subject: another couple mailman bugs (still 2.0beta2)

(15) If someone who is not currently subscribed to a list sends a
"subscribe" message to it, and if the list rejects messages from
people who aren't subscribed, they get a message like the following:

    Your mail to 'FOO' with the subject

	subscribe

    Is being held until the list moderator can review it for approval.

    The reason it is being held:

	Post by non-member to a members-only list

But this is stupid.  What -should- happen is, if the list is currently
set to notice things that look like administrivia, the message should
be internally bounced to the -request address, so they user gets to
participate in the confirmation and/or approval dialog.

In other words, Mailman should check administrivia-to-list -first-,
(and reflect it to -request), -then- check for non-subscriber posts.
Perhaps it's a bad idea to do this for -all- things that look like
administrivia, because then the moderator might not get to approve
something that really wasn't administrivia (because it spuriously
wound up at the -request address)---but if so, Mailman should at
least check the special case we have above.  Once again, that's:
  (a) administrivia to main list
  (b) administrivia looks like "subscribe"
  (c) uername is not already subscribed
if so, then bounce to -request address and do whatever the -request
address would do with a subscription request

[By the way, in the bounce message above, that "Is" should be "is", no
doubt.]

(16) Mailman can't make up its mind about capitalization.  If I've
told it that a list should be called FOO (e.g., via the first entry in
the General Options configuration page), then the welcome message when
someone subscribes says "Welcome to the FOO at some.domain mailing list."
and then continues with the welcome text I've configured via the web
interface.  But the "confirmation of subscription" message the user
gets first refers to the list as "foo at some.domain" and
"foo-request at some.domain" and so forth.  I haven't checked all the
other various messages and pages, but I'll bet they're equally
inconsistent.

This is (a) ugly and (b) potentially a problem, because not all
mailsystems treat stuff to the left of the @ as case-insensitive.
The -right- approach is actually to have -two- configurable things in
the web interface:  the "human-readable name" and the "mailsystem
name", just in case the former wants to be FOO and the latter wants to
be foo.  And if this is done, Mailman needs to use the right one at
each point in its templates.  (Even if this -isn't- done, Mailman needs
to be consistent about whichever one it chooses.  But it should really
allow configuring both.)

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