[Mailman-Users] Private mailing list reply watcher

[Tomáš Babej]

The situation (let's call it situation S) I want to detect is as follows:

1.) not-member writes to a private mailing list which serves as a contact
point
2.) member writes a reply to the list (usually by hitting reply-to and not
reply-all in his mail client)

Depending on the circumstances, this can be intentional or not.

* if you need to discuss the content of the non-member's message privately,
it can be intentional
* if you wanted to reply to the non-member, it is not intentional (and can
be easily missed, since
  every list member sees the email in the thread and thinks the mailing
list has been cc-ed)

Since you cannot really distinguish between these two variants, my thought
is to monitor the mailing list,
and if the situation S occurs, have a warning message replied to the list
("Warning! This email
was addressed to the mailing list only.")

My thoughts how to go with this are:

* gain access to the conferrence Mailbox, and watch it with for changes
with inotify
* on Mailbox change, parse it with python script which will detect
situation S and send a warning to the list
* list of the members can be extracted using list_members

Compared to integrating this with the mailman directly, this has the
advantage of working with any mailing
list solution (as long as list of members can be easily extracted).

Thoughts? Would anybody be interested in such tool?


On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 12:42 AM, Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net> wrote:

> On 04/30/2014 07:33 AM, Tomas Babej wrote:
> >
> > I plan to write a script that will handle such cases in a generic way,
> > however, I don't like reinventing the wheel. Does anybody know if this
> > problem has already been solved?
>
>
> What problem are you trying to solve? Remailing the reply from the list
> archive to the original sender, or something else?
>
> From your Subject:, it seems you're looking for something that monitors
> list traffic and in case of a message determined to be a reply to the
> list with no Cc: to someone else, sends that message to the someone
> else, but identifying to whom might be tricky. I'd be interested in what
> you come up with.
>
> --
> Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
> San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan
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