[Mailman-Users] Automatic subscription based on e-mail subject

[Richard Damon]

On 2/1/19 4:44 PM, Grant Taylor via Mailman-Users wrote:
> On 02/01/2019 01:14 AM, R. Diez via Mailman-Users wrote:
>> Of course there is the concept of 'Topic' in a mailing list. Mailman,
>> the web interface, or whatever, does know how to group topics
>> together. That is an obvious feature, because people tend to
>> work/participate in threads.
>
> I believe that what Mailman (2) considers to be a "topic" is
> considerably different than what you might consider to be a "topic" or
> "subject" or "thread".
>
> My understanding is that Mailman considers a message to be part of a
> "topic" if the message has one or more key words defined for the
> topic. I.e. any message that has SMTP could be one topic, or DNS be
> another, or Python a third.  This is decidedly NOT the "subject" or
> "thread" meaning of the word "topic" that I think you are using.
>
> What makes this more interesting ~> problematic is that I think
> Mailman doesn't actually scan the message body for the topic(s) /
> keyword(s). Instead, I believe it requires the topic(s) / keyword(s)
> to be listed in the Keywords: header.  -  I know that I've used
> procmail to scan (copies of) messages and add the proper topic(s) /
> keyword(s) to the Keywords: header so that Mailman would see them and
> use it's topic filter properly.  -  This was a LONG time ago and I
> have forgotten almost all of the context.  This may no longer be a
> requirement for current versions of Mailman.
>
> Suffice it to say that Mailman's "Topic" concept is different than
> concept that you and I have for "topic" / "subject" / "thread".
Yes, Mailman has a feature call topics, but that is very different then
what the OP is asking for. The Mailman 'Topic' operation basically
provides the ability of the list owner to define topics based on Regex's
on the subject (which is helped greatly if posters add the appropriate
key words to subjects to allow them to be categorized). I suppose one
option that might satisfy the OP would be the ability for the subscriber
to add a custom regex as a filter. That way they could get it to filter
on the replies they are looking for, and ignore the rest. The biggest
issue is that regex's are somewhat archaic for the typical user, but it
would only really affect people who try to use it.

-- 
Richard Damon