[Mailman-Users] Block reply to all

[Mark Sapiro]

On 5/2/2010 12:10 PM, rpschwar at knology.net wrote:
> 
> This is what I'm trying to do. User x sends a post to listy. User z
> receives the post from the list.
> 
> I want user Z only to be able to reply to user x and otherwise to be
> required to send a new, origional, not-preply message to the list.


Thanks for the explanation. The short answer is you can't remove the
list posting address from all the headers. Normally it will be in the
To: header or Cc: header and 'reply-all' will include the list. If the
personalization options are available to you, you can set the list(s) to
Full Personalization which will replace the To: header with one that is
To: the recipient of the message, but this will not help because Mailman
will in this case add a Cc: to the list posting address in order to
facilitate including the list in replies.

Mailman works this way because it is designed mainly for discussion
lists where people carry out a multi-way conversation on the list.

Thus, the only thing you can do is as has been suggested, apply
header_filter_rules to not accept posts that contain In-Reply-To: and/or
References: headers, or use max_num_recipients = 2 to hold all posts
with more than one recipient.

To this latter suggestion, you replied:

> That didn't work because the first message sent will go to yourself
> and the mailing list which will be blocked. If you tell it not to send
> it to yourself, the first message will send. If you try to reply to all
> to this message it will also be sent because the reply to will only have
> the member list.


This reply raises other questions. The first sentence seems to indicate
you want to send to the list with Cc: to yourself, and yes, such a post
would be held as it would have 2 recipients. However, the last sentence
indicates you are concerned about people replying-all to their own
posts. Is this a real concern, or is it just something you encountered
in testing with replying to your own post? I.e., normally, a reply-all
would include the list and the poster and would be held for 2
recipients. Only in the case where you are replying-all to your own post
and not editing the recipients, would the post have only one recipient.

Of course with a recipient limit, the user could still do a reply-all
and then remove all but the list address from the addressees before
sending, and this reply would go to the list if you were only checking
the number of recipients, so it seems if you want to block all
non-original messages, header_filter_rules would be the way to go.

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