[Mailman-Users] "aliases" for subscriber addresses?

[Eric D. Christensen]

> Aren't you asking mailman to fix a problem that is in the clients network?
>
> Why not get their sys admin to fix the problem with how people address
> look on the outside?

Yes, agreed it's really the user's problem... but we're dealing with the
"real" world here. Lots of gateway products... particularly older Mac,
Novell and various Mainframe gateways really munge up email addresses for no
apparent reason. As a system administrator it irritates the living crap out
of me. But go try to convince a bunch of old school mainframe admins at
someplace like General Motors or Bank of America that their PROFS gateway is
broken. I'd get more satisfaction by hitting myself over the head with a 2x4
for a couple hours.

The other reason for having subscriber aliasing support (maybe better called
"alternate addresses") is the more common problem of a user having 2
addresses... say home and work. They'd like to be able to post from more
than one account, but that means that I inevitably end up doing the approval
from one or the other.

Some other list managers that I've worked with over the years have had this
capability, and I've found it to be a handy feature.

I suppose that I could make a mod to mailman to handle this, but I'm not a
python guru and I really don't have much time to go explore the existing
code to figure out what I need to modify. Not o mention that if I'm going to
hack on the code, I want to do it "right" so I can contribute it back to the
project. I could always rewrite addresses with a ruleset in sendmail or a
procmail filter on the incoming queue, but that's hardly the "right" way to
handle it. Perhaps next month when one of my contracts ends I'll be able to
squeak in a few hours some afternoon to come up with a good solution.

----
Eric D. Christensen
ProAdmin, Inc.
Serious System Administration
(408)776-3410