[Mailman-Users] Umbrella List / Moderation

[stephen at xemacs.org]

Bruce E. Breeding writes:

 > I'm implementing an umbrella list over three other lists.

 > When I send mail to the umbrella list, three events occur:

 > (a) For each of the three lists, I (as owner) receive a request for
 >     approval with the message: Message has implicit destination

Add "UMBRELLALISTNAME at listdomain.org" to acceptable_aliases in
Privacy>Recipient Filters.

 > (b) Duplicate receiving email addresses (on two or all three of the
 >     sublists) are not being eliminated.

No way to win here, currently.  Mailman could easily keep a database
of delivered-msgid/subscriber/timestamp triples, but for large
high-traffic lists this would be huge even with short expirations, and
probably would impact performance severely (the database would need to
be locked for every single delivery).  More sophisticated algorithms
specifically for umbrella lists could be designed, but that would
require a centralized user database which Mailman doesn't have yet.
(For the relatively rare "do this for all my lists" kind of user
request, it just interates over all lists looking for the user in the
list-specific databases.)

If you really want that badly and your lists are small, it would be
easy to insert such a delivery database filter into the pipeline, plus
a couple of lines of code in the actual delivery Handler to consult
it.  (I don't have one yet, not even a proof of concept.  Sorry.  But
somebody should be able to pick up on the hint.)