[Mailman-Users] Re: Removing those extra List-* headers

[Tom Neff]

David <jebva at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Actually itis the only product that my host offers for mailing lists.
> It is a damn good program in all respects other than the programmers
> decision to force this on us and wrongfully cite it as following the
> standards.  The standards make it optional not forced.  Hell I like
> Mailman but just wisk they would change that and stop telling us things
> that are not true when we ask how to make it work the way we want.

Look, I completely agree with you about this major gotcha with Mailman, 
that its otherwise terrifically brilliant coders happen to have some 
ideological hobbyhorses they ride - there is no use arguing with them about 
it.

The good news is it's open source, so you can patch your installation as 
needed.  I was concerned to read you were unable to patch out the List-*: 
behavior.  What happened when you tried?

Here's a one-byte patch that does it.  Assuming you're running Mailman 
2.0.8/9, just edit the file

	$base/Mailman/Handlers/CookHeaders.py

and look down at the bottom, where you see an area of code that looks like 
this:

    # First we delete any pre-existing headers because the RFC permist only
    # one copy of each, and we want to be sure it's ours.
    for h, v in headers.items():
        del msg[h]
        # Wrap these lines if they are too long.  78 character width 
probably
        # shouldn't be hardcoded.  The adding of 2 is for the colon-space
        # separator.
        if len(h) + 2 + len(v) > 78:
            v = string.join(string.split(v, ', '), ',\n\t')
        msg[h] = v

Just change that very last line quoted above to say

	#msg[h] = v

in other words, comment the line out.  Save that file, rerun Mailman and 
you should be all set.