[Mailman-Users] Mailman - a few questions

[andale at excaliburworld.com]

Hi All,

I am a list administrator for a number of mailing lists hosted on 
lists.sonic.net.  The folks at sonic are great, except they really 
don't fully understand Mailman, so I am hoping to get a few of my 
issues resolved here.

All my lists are pretty standard (aka, I don't need any help for 
them), except for one.  One of the lists was recently migrated from 
Autoshare (finally got to say goodbye to Mac OS 9, the only OS 
Autoshare runs on).  There are certain features of Autoshare that are 
awesome, but I cannot figure out how to configure Mailman to support 
these features.

In a nutshell, this list is a combination announcement list and tech 
support list, and the list contributions are modified by the list 
administrator on a regular basis (either to remove excessive text 
from previous posts, add signatures, remove profane or rude language, 
and/or remove sensitive data that is commonly posted in error on our 
list).  The way it worked on Autoshare, and they way I want it to 
work on Mailman, is like this:

All posts go directly to the moderator (not the mailman "list 
moderator", because that puts a bunch of extraneous pre-text in the 
email that I don't want to have to wade through on every post).  Upon 
acceptance of the post, modified or not, I then redirect the post to 
the actual mailing list.  Redirect means the "TO:" header remains in 
tact as the original poster, and the moderator email is the 
"envelope" sender.  Autoshare recognized the envelope sender and 
passed the post through to the list immediately.

I have been unable to recreate this configuration on Mailman, but I'm 
hoping that there is a way to do it.  I have successfully set up the 
list such that the Reply-To goes to the moderator.  This sends the 
post, in tact, with no extraneous pre-text, directly to the 
moderator.  The problems I'm having are as follows:

1. The reply-to does not seem to work for digest members.  Digest 
members are reporting that the reply-to of the digests goes to the 
list (which then creates the moderator email text before sending to 
the moderator).  How do I get the reply-to for digest members to work 
the same as non-digest?

2. For members whose email clients use buttons based upon email 
headers - specifically, list-id - they click on Reply to List and it 
goes to the wrong place.  I would either like to change the list-id 
value, or remove it entirely.  Is there a way to do that?

3. When I redirect the modified/approved post to the list, I want the 
TO field to maintain the original poster's email, and the moderator's 
email will be the envelope sender.  I would like the Mailman list to 
recognize the envelope sender to authorize immediate distribution of 
the post.  Currently, however, it holds the post for moderator 
approval.  Is there a way to do this?

4. Lastly, the web archives created by Autoshare automatically 
created clickable HTML links for all HTML URL's in posts.  The 
Mailman archives are all unclickable plain text URL's.  Note, I want 
the list to remain a plain text list, as it was on Autoshare, but I'd 
still like Mailman to build HTML code to make the links active in the 
web archive.  Is there a way to do this?


I really appreciate any help in this matter.

Bill C.