[Mailman-Users] "Bounce action notification" emails for subscribes/unsubscribes

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Terry . writes:

 > Any comments on any of this, Mark or anyone else, especially re
 > this claim: "...this is a result of an upstream design choice from
 > Mailman not from cPanel,

As I understand it, the "design choice" meant is to have a sitewide
address "mailman at site.tld".  This isn't so much a "design choice" as a
long-established Internet mail tradition that there needs to be a
contact address that reaches humans for every automatic installation.
For the mail system itself, this is formalized in RFC 2142, which
defines addresses like "postmaster" and "hostmaster", as well as the
"LIST-request" address for mailing lists.  Since Mailman has an
additional layer of "site" administration above the lists themselves,
we added *one address per mailman instance*, the "mailman" address.

Mailman was designed for "real" sites with a single domain hosting
lists, not for virtual hosting.  This is unfortunate for cPanel, we
admit, but handling of the "mailman" list and its associated aliases
in Mailman 2 (which is a 15-year-old architecture IIRC) are well-
adapted to that use case.  (Making it a list is a natural choice, and
I don't see how that causes additional difficulties for cPanel.)

It is certainly true that "Mailman does not create an alias for
mailman-bounces."  Mailman doesn't create *any* aliases, because alias
management is done by MTAs.  Mailman is agnostic about MTAs, and each
MTA has its own system for setting up aliases.  Furthermore, many
hosts have unique needs for their systems, so there is no "one size
fits all" configuration for targets of aliases.  We do provide sample
configurations for simple cases (single host, single instance, site
owner manages most lists too) for the MTAs we are most familiar with,
but the responsibility for setting up aliases is with the system
administrator who installs Mailman.  (This division of
responsibilities remains in Mailman 3.)

That "system administrator" might be a person, or it might be a
distribution script.  I don't know how cPanel is architected, so I
don't know where this reponsibility might best be handled in a cPanel
installation.  But I can tell you that Mailman has never assumed it,
while all of the usual distros (Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, Centos,
FreeBSD, etc) do, each in its own way.

I get the feeling that this doesn't fully address the conversation
among you, your host, and cPanel.  It should give you some idea of how
we view the system administration responsibilities, though.

Hope this helps.

Steve