[Mailman-Users] Question related to parent lists

[Arif Mamdani]

Hey folks,
I've been beating my head against the wall on this one for a while, and 
could really use a few fresh sets of eyeballs on the following:

At my job, we're running a number of lists for ourself and other 
organizations working on similar issues.  We've started to get 
complaints about people getting duplicate postings because we've 
reached a level where people are subscribed to multiple lists that we 
host, and folks are cross posting to lists fairly frequently.  My first 
instinct was to look at setting up either a parent list, but I've come 
up against the fact that while the parent list would avoid recipients 
getting duplicate messages, it would entail creating a new list, and we 
want to avoid that because we'd like to be able retain the "credit" for 
where the message originally came from -- in other words, if I've got a 
parent list whose members are made of lists a at somewhere.org, 
b at somewhere.org, and c at somewhere.org, we'd like to retain the prepended 
text that's added when someone sends a message to one of the child 
lists, in large part to be able to identify to all recipients which 
organization's responsible for the post.

It seems to me that we want something that's like a combination of the 
umbrella and parent lists in one big fancy package, but I can't for the 
life of me figure out how that would work.  From what I've been able to 
sort out, there are two separate issues.  The first is maintaining the 
text that's prepended to the subject line of list messages.  The second 
is the fact that there's no common thread whereby a message should be 
flagged for delivery to the parent list instead of the individual list 
-- if there were, I'd use a procmail recipe and be done with it.

At this point, I'm wondering if this is even possible, mostly because 
issue two seems insurmountable, but partially because of issue one.

So, i'd love to get and ideas anyone has on how to approach this -- is 
there something I'm not seeing here?  Am I making this more complicated 
then it should be?  Any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

-arif