[Mailman-Users] Re: broadcast only

[Dan Mick]

> I would *love* to have an option to click "Announce Only" list and when the
> user gets the welcome message it's *clearly* noted that it's:
> 
> 1. Not a list they or others (other than the authorized admins/company/etc.)
> can send messages to.
> 2. Somehow indicates the frequency that they will receive messages
> (customizable to each list).


Well, I guess I don't see the need for a mailing-list manager for 
such things, because it seems like they're nearly-always a 
"broadcast-only, you are subscribed because you're someone I've
been given the right to broadcast to" list, for which normal
aliases work *very* well.  

The trick to avoid backposts is to send the message with "To:"
set to yourself, and "Bcc:" the alias; then everyone on the alias
gets the mail, any replies go directly to the "To:" address
and not the list, and no one has to know the name of the list.

Mailman need not be involved in this; the archival, member-sub-unsub,
and other value-adds of an MLM aren't useful for this application.

Sometimes the tool doesn't work well because it's the wrong tool.

If there's some feature of Mailman I'm missing, there is another
option for mail rejection: SpamReject.py can be hand-edited to
reject mails by comparing headers to a Python regular expression.
While it's editing Python source code, it doesn't really require
knowledge of Python to do it (only Python's flavor of regular
expressions, and a bit of knowledge of the format of a list literal).
This sort of rejection sends no response, and triggers no approval
mechanism; it just drops the message onto the floor.

With a little more Python coding, one could write a parallel to
SpamDetect.py that would format up an autoreply, or maybe even
reorder the module order in HandlerAPI.py to do Replybot before
SpamDetect (I don't know if this will work or not) to have the
Replybot module autorespond, and then have SpamDetect or its
brother drop the message.