[Mailman-Users] accept_these_nonmembers not working

[Mark Sapiro]

Cyndi Norwitz wrote:
>   From: Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>
>
>   How about another address in her message. If any address in a From:,
>   Reply-To: or Sender: header or the envelope sender is a list member,
>   the post will be considered to be from that member for purposes of
>   moderation.
>
>Ahhh...I checked her latest post and she has reply-to set to a different
>address.  And that address is indeed subscribed to the list.  Because it
>never was a checkbox option in the moderation section of the admin site, I
>never unchecked the moderation box.  I have unchecked it now from the
>members list.  
>
>I will let you know if it doesn't solve the problem.


I am confident that it will. This is an inconsistency in Mailman.
Mailman sees the Reply-To: is a moderated member and holds the post
for moderation, but admindb only uses the From: [1] to determine what
checkboxes to show you.

The problem here is the first time, admindb showed you the nonmember
filter boxes because the From: was not a member, but that wasn't why
the post was held, so adding the From: to accept_these_nonmembers
didn't do any good.

This is something to be aware of going forward. If the post is held for
"Post to moderated list" and the "Add to one of these sender filters"
option is offered, adding the From: address to a filter isn't going to
work because this is really a post from a moderated member, but
admindb is checking the wrong address.


>   Actually, I think you are using Sonic's Mailman which we've already
>   determined is non-standard at least wrt mass subscribe.
>
>Now, now, I think an ISP disabling mass subscribe for its hundreds
>(thousands?) of users it doesn't know personally is pretty reasonable.
>It's a PITA for responsible list owners like me but there are some
>irresponsible people out there and many of them think nothing of
>subscribing lots of people to mailing lists without their permission.
>After all, most Mailman users install it on their own servers, so obviously
>they trust themselves.  As far as I can tell, the rest of the setup is
>pretty standard.


Don't misunderstand me. I wasn't trying to say anything negative about
Sonic (except maybe they are not complying with the GPL if they
haven't contributed their mods back to the project). I'm only trying
to say that I can only tell you how standard Mailman does (or should)
work. I can't analyze code that I can't see.


[1] The underlying issue here is there are two methods for getting
senders in Mailman's Message class. get_sender() returns the first
address found in From:,  Sender: and envelope_from (or Sender:, From:
and envelope_from if mm_cfg.USE_ENVELOPE_SENDER is true), while
get_senders() returns a list of all addresses in (by default) From:,
envelope_from, Reply-To: and Sender:. Initially, the entire
get_senders() list is checked to find the first address that is a list
member. If found, the post is 'from' a member and that member's
moderate status is checked. If none of the addresses is a member, only
the single get_sender() address is checked against *_these_nonmembers,
and only the single get_sender() address is used by admindb to
determine what checkbox options to show.

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