[Mailman-Users] Wishlist and maybe problem solution

[Richard Barrett]

At 16:25 03/06/2003, Gerfried Fuchs wrote:
>         Hi!
>
>  Mailman is great, mailman is good, all hail mailman :)
>
>  I have to administer a mailing list for which a special requirement was
>requested:
>
>  It will be a moderated list where only special people might be able to
>send mails through.  All these mails should have the same From: header,
>so I thought using the »anonymous_list« might be a good idea -- but I
>don't see any chance to specify what mailman will put in there. It
>simply always puts listname at hostname.domain in there, which is someone
>we would like to change.  Is there a posibility to make this
>configureable in future versions?  I guess this could be quite helpful
>for others, too.
>
>  Along the same lines, might it be possible to have an option to rewrite
>the To: header, too?  It should become a more or less "hidden" setup
>here, so that could be of help.
>
>  There is one thing that I like to question: The envelope-sender is set
>to the -bounce address. From my understanding it must be sufficient to
>set the Return-Path header to the -bounce address for it to work
>correctly.  The reason why I question this is that there are some mail
>servers/clients (especially lotus notes) that display something like
>this:
>|From: [listname-bounce at hostname.domain] on behalf of [real.sender at domain]
>(or something along these lines, I was just told about the german string
>that is in between). This doesn't look quite nice and is afaik not
>needed, for the only header used for bounce messages must be return-path
>anyway.

I think you will also find some versions of MS Outlook display this 
conflation of several headers in the "From" field of their GUI (see 
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq02.003.htp). The 
purpose of this behaviour is presumably to alert the end user to the 
possibility of something "nefarious" because of the (entirely valid) 
discrepancy between different headers on a message. This behaviour cannot 
be controlled by Mailman because it is the programmed into the MUA's GUI 
code. Fiddling with Mailman will not, I fear, fix programmed behaviour of 
some MUAs in any reliable way.

>  If these things aren't that easy to change (I would be pleased if
>someone can send me a patch over, for I'm not that well in python (or
>rather baaad)), can someone tell me if there is a way to tweak sendmail
>to change this? I guess I shouldn't be the first to be faced with this
>problem, so some might already have found a solution for this in
>sendmail on their own.
>
>  Otherwise I'd have to use a private mailing-skript in the meantime that
>allows me to set the headers on my own, and set just the return-path to
>the -bounce address to get into the benefit of the bounce control
>mailman does. It's just these special requirements in this case...
>
>  Btw., I do love mailman, did I mention that already?
>alfie
>
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Richard Barrett                                      http://www.openinfo.co.uk