[Mailman-Users] E-mail-based moderation

Brian J Mingus Brian.Mingus at Colorado.EDU
Tue Oct 27 05:34:00 CET 2009


I have mailman set up such that I am aliased to the *-owner address and I
receive an e-mail for every message sent to my moderated list. The subject
of this e-mail is "Connectionists post from * requires approval." This
e-mail has two forwarded messages embedded in it, one from the poster, and
another that looks like this:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: *-request
To:
Date:
Subject: confirm e2a38902a4d73808769e0bd9e848a069010c3181
If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact,
Mailman will discard the held message.  Do this if the message is
spam.  If you reply to this message and include an Approved: header
with the list password in it, the message will be approved for posting
to the list.  The Approved: header can also appear in the first line
of the body of the reply.


This almost allows me to moderate my list entirely from within Gmail. Gmail
Labs contains a "Canned responses" feature that allows me to easily insert
the Approved: password line into my reply. Unfortunately *-request isn't the
address that sends me this e-mail, so I must change the address in my reply.
The subject is also wrong so I must change that, rendering this solution
ineffective. Ideally Mailman would send me this e-mail from *-request
instead of *-owner, would continue to include the posters entire e-mail, and
would use the confirm <hash> subject line, including accepting Re: confirm
<hash> as a valid reply.

I am not the sysadmin of the mail server, but if there is some simple way to
configure mailman to behave in this way it would be highly desirable for me.
My list has 5,000 subscribers and the mail server is extremely slow.
Moderating from the mailman interface is tortuous for me, but having to jump
through so many hoops in Gmail is just as bad.

Many thanks :)

/Brian


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