[Mailman-Users] Mystery of the site-wide mailing list...

Bill.Costa at unh.edu Bill.Costa at unh.edu
Mon May 4 23:02:17 CEST 2015


I'm migrating our site from ListProc to Mailman and am in the
process of wrapping my head around the Mailman way of doing
things.

For almost 20 years we have had the established email address
list.admin at unh.edu as *the* way to contact your friendly local
neighborhood mailing list site administrator.  ListProc, as part
of the list configuration, made it easy to specify this already
established address as the single contact point for the site
admin for all automatically generated emails.

With Mailman I am seeing the convention of using the site-wide
mailing list's owner address for contacting the site admin, both
in messages for list owners...

> From: mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu
> To: joe list owner
> Subject: Your new mailing list: my.list
>
> The mailing list `my.list' has just been created for you.  The
> following is some basic information about your mailing list.
     :
     :
> Please address all questions to mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu.

...and in messages sent to subscribers....

> From: mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu
> To: mary list subscriber
> Subject: lists.unh.edu mailing list memberships reminder
>
> This is a reminder, sent out once a month, about your lists.unh.edu
> mailing list memberships.
     :
     :
> If you have questions, problems, comments, etc, send them to
> mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu.  Thanks!

But if you go to the top-level listinfo web page, you see the
suggestion:

> If you are having trouble using the lists, please contact
> mailman at lists.unh.edu.

This address in particular does the user no good since, if
configured as suggested, the site-wide mailing list does not
accept non-subscriber postings.

> From: mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu 
> To: fred random user
> Subject: How do I...
>
> Your message has been rejected, probably because you are not
> subscribed to the mailing list and the list's policy is to
> prohibit non-members from posting to it.  If you think that
> your messages are being rejected in error, contact the mailing
> list owner at mailman-owner at lists.unh.edu.

I searched the archives for more information about the role of
the site-wide mailing list, and found this thread that is related
to my issue.  It is unanswered as far as I can tell.

https://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/msg25082.html

So here is what I want to do.  Any place that mailman would
direct the user to the site administrator, I would like it to use
our long established address for that function, and not
mailman-owner, and certainly not the mailman list posting address
if that is not what it is suppose to be used for.  At this point
the only thing I can find that is relevant is changing the name
of the site-wide list, but then I would still get the
auto-generated email address of "list.admin-owner at lists.unh.edu"
which is not desirable, and I would have to open up postings to
the world to the site-wise list which does not seem to be the
recommended practice.

Any help or suggestions would be welcomed.

...BC

-- 
=====================================[ Bill.Costa at unh.edu ]==
  Bill Costa
  1 Leavitt Lane
  UNH IT -- 1st Floor
  University of New Hampshire
  Durham, NH  03824
  USA
  Voice: +1-603-862-3056
  No good deed... Goes unpunished.
===========================[ http://pubpages.unh.edu/~wfc ]==


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