[Mailman-Users] Sender filters discard messages but can't forwardto the list owner?

[Mark Sapiro]

lists at datatravels.com wrote:
>
>Here is what seems to be to be a limitation of MailMain, I am writing 
>to this list to confirm the limitation as I understand it.
>
>I want to have a moderated announce-only list where list members cannot 
>post to the list. I have done this by making all of my users moderated. 
>In Privacy options > Sender Filters, I can set members' messages to be 
>Accepted, Held, Rejected, or Discarded.

Well, you can't actually set member_moderation_action to Accept because
it is logically inconsistent with moderation in the first place, but
other than that, you are correct.

>What I want are the messages to be Discarded, but ALSO forwarded to the 
>mailing list owner. It seems that this is impossible with MailMan, 
>please confirm if this is your understanding as well.

Yes, that is correct.

>I was trying to configure it this way because I wanted users to be able 
>to hit 'Reply' and send an unsubscribe request and have their message 
>be intercepted by the MailMan software (it says it can "intercept 
>message that look like admin requests"), perform the necessary 
>unsubscribe, OR if the message does not appear to be an admin request, 
>forward it to the list owner.

Administrivia doesn't work this way anyway, The description is

  Administrivia tests will check postings to see whether it's really
  meant as an administrative request (like subscribe, unsubscribe, etc),
  and will add it to the the administrative requests queue, notifying
  the administrator of the new request, in the process.

This could be more clear, but what happens is the same thing as "Hold".
I.e. if administrivia is yes, a post that appears to be an
administrative request is held for administrator action. It is not
automatically acted on.

>If I set the Reply-To of the to be the list owner always (or an 
>explicit address in General Options), then when a user hits 'reply' and 
>types a command it goes to that list owner's email address, by passing 
>the list altogether.
>
>Please let me know if there is any way I can do what I am trying to do 
>with Mail Man.  What I am concluding from this experience is the 
>MailMan is basically programmed only to let you unsubscribe in two 
>ways:
>
>1) using the unsubscribe email address provided in the List Headers
>2) using the URL provided in the user's General List Info page
>
>It is not programmed to intercept messages and check them to see if 
>they are requests and forward them if they are not. Is that conclusion 
>correct?

More or less. If you haven't seen
http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq03.011.htp
check it out. It has some ideas for dealing with unsubscribes on an
announce-only list, but without hacking code, you can't have a message
to the list be discarded except if it looks like an unsub request and
have it automatically result in an unsub in that case.

You could come close to what you want by setting administrivia to Yes
and setting member_moderation_action to Discard and setting a pipeline
attribute for the list which is the same as the default
GLOBAL_PIPELINE except put 'Hold' before 'Moderate'. Since Hold
processes administrivia, this should result in an administrivia
message being held and if it's not administrivia, it will pass on to
moderate and be discarded. An administrator would still have to
manually unsubscribe the user, but it seems close.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan