[Mailman-Users] Gmail "features"

[Lucio Crusca]

Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
>
> Your fact is presumably due to some error in observation, since Gmail
> acknowledges this behavior as a feature of Gmail.  It is simply not
> possible to receive your own posts on Gmail; you can only keep the
> Sent folder copy.

I can confirm my observation is correct. I have at least three gmail users
which I personally know that suffer from that "feature" on one of my lists
and don't experience the same problem on another list which is mailman
powered but hosted at a friend's server.

Other users started to experience the "feature" only when I migrated a
mailing list from a server to another and they notified me just after the
migration. I currently have a few examples of existing and running mailing
lists powered by mailman where gmail subscribers do receive their own
posts, this is one:

http://mailman.pinerolo.linux.it/mailman/listinfo/soci

Feel free to try subscribing to the above list and try posting from gmail.
It's an italian language list dedicated to our local linux users group,
but as far as you put an [OT] in the subject there are no problems.

>
> Are you sure you don't mean a different issue such as FAQ 3.42?
>
>     http://wiki.list.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=4030690

Absolutely sure. Messages from the list are correctly delivered to gmail
subscribers, except the ones themselves sent.

> Please recheck; if there's a reasonable way to get around this, there
> are probably thousands of Gmail users who would love to do so.  But I
> suspect you'll discover that Gmail users simply won't receive their
> own posts from the list.

Like I said, I suspect it depends on the list. My current best guess is
that older lists (i.e. the ones that had been created before some time in
the past) don't hit the infamous feature, while newer ones do.

> I would imagine that you could change the Message-ID at the list, and
> that might do the trick. But that is strictly against the relevant
> standards for mail.

What's more against standards than throwing messages away like gmail does?
I wouldn't care too much if the patch concerned only gmail subscribers.

> It should be possible to do it for the particular message sent to the
> poster only, but that would be delicate.

Please elaborate. That would be the solution. I imagine something fairly
simple and not very intrusive, like adding something like this somewhere
in the mailman code:

msg = create_message_copy(message)

if msg.recipient == msg.sender &&
   is_option_active(workaround_gmail_feature) &&
   domain(msg.recipient) == "gmail"
       # do whatever delicate and nasty on msg
       # in order to have it delivered.
       # At worst, it won't be delivered anyway...
endif

send_message(msg)