[Mailman-Users] Member list in header/footer

[Nigel Metheringham]

On 04 Jun 2001 13:24:58 -0400, Scott Barron wrote:
> Those that sign my paycheck wish to see the list of member addresses in the
> message header.  Can I do this with the current mailman?  I've found where to
> add headers and the list of variables to insert certain things but the member
> list wasn't one of them.  If this can not be done with a stock install where
> might I look in the source to add such a thing?

Technically this is possible to do, as outlined by Barry.
However it is a very silly thing to do - do you want *every* member of
the list in the headers, or just the ones handled by this delivery
(Mailman tends to batch deliveries into chunks of recipients)?  A
thousand recipients, at (say) 50 bytes per recipient will add 50K of
headers.  At this point you will find some MTAs will explode when they
get a header or a multiple header set of this length.

When someone gets a message like this and replies to it you can just bet
they use "reply to all" - so a copy goes to the list (is that still in
the headers) and another copy goes to each list member.  Then people
complain about double receiving messages, of course sending the
complaints to everyone and before you know it you have a mail loop of
sorts and a lot of unhappy people.

Autoreply functions, which are in general terminally stupid, now have
more addresses to autospam...

Everyone's email addresses are out there and available for spam address
harvesters.

If you have dealings with EU people you have probably just broken EU
data protection legislation by broadcasting personal data (email
addresses) without adequate permissions and safeguards.

You *really* need to push back on this... mailing lists work the way
they do for a reason, and breaking them without good technical reason
will give you pain.

    Nigel.
-- 
[ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
[ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
[ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
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