[Mailman-Users] Auto-Responses

Greg Ward gward at mems-exchange.org
Tue Nov 6 20:14:00 CET 2001


On 06 November 2001, Camille K. Powell said:
> Thanks, but I hope there's a better way.  I just switched from EZMLM to
> Mailmain and I never had this problem.  The auto-replies used to go to the
> person that posted the message, not to the list.

That may have something to do with the fact that ezmlm crafts a separate
message, with a unique SMTP sender, for each message to each list
member.  That's more expensive (in temporary storage, bandwidth, and
CPU) than Mailman's approach, but probably makes bounce-handling much
simpler for ezmlm than it is for Mailman.

On reflection, I can't understand why a auto-responder would send
auto-responses to the *list*.  They should either go to the list admin
address (if the autoresponder looks at the SMTP sender) or to the
original sender (if it looks at the "From" header).  Eg. here are some
headers from my last post to this list:
it do so!):

  Return-path: <mailman-users-admin at python.org>
  [...skip Received headers...]
  To: "Camille K. Powell" <cpowell at asciences.com>
  Cc: mailman-users at python.org
  Subject: Re: [Mailman-Users] Auto-Responses
  Message-ID: <20011106131756.B17237 at mems-exchange.org>
  [...]
  From: Greg Ward <gward at mems-exchange.org>
  Sender: mailman-users-admin at python.org
  Errors-To: mailman-users-admin at python.org
  X-BeenThere: mailman-users at python.org
  X-Mailman-Version: 2.0.6 (101270)
  Precedence: bulk
  List-Help: <mailto:mailman-users-request at python.org?subject=help>
  List-Post: <mailto:mailman-users at python.org>
  List-Subscribe: <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users>,
          <mailto:mailman-users-request at python.org?subject=subscribe>
  List-Id: Mailman mailing list management users <mailman-users.python.org>
  List-Unsubscribe: <http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users>,
          <mailto:mailman-users-request at python.org?subject=unsubscribe>
  List-Archive: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/>

An autoresponder that receives this message should either look at the
return-path (a header for the SMTP sender), or the "From" header, or the
"Sender" header.  In none of those cases would it auto-respond to
mailman-users at python.org.

Hmmm: you don't happen to have "Reply-to the list" set on your list, do
you?

        Greg
-- 
Greg Ward - software developer                gward at mems-exchange.org
MEMS Exchange                            http://www.mems-exchange.org




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