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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

R. Diez via Mailman-Users writes:

 > I have the following recurring problem with mailing lists all over
 > the Internet: people do reply to my posts, by they do not address
 > or copy me in their replies. They send their e-mails only to the
 > mailing list. Or they reply to the previous reply, and forget to
 > copy the original poster.

A mailing list may send mail to tens, thousands, or millions of
people.  If you have no connection to them, but post to the list for
your own benefit, that is called "spam".  It is generally considered
somewhere between rude and criminal.  At the very least you should
establish a minimal connection by subscribing.

 > This problem has annoyed me (and other people on the Internet) for
 > a long time.

It's not a problem with mailing lists; the kind of interaction you
desire is not what they're designed for.  That kind of interaction has
its place, but the software has to implement a "pull" model so that
nobody needs to make any effort to ignore everybody else.

 > Other forum software has a nice feature for this scenario: If I
 > post to a subject, I am automatically subscribed to that subject. I
 > then get an e-mail for any new posts with the same subject.

Mailman is not forum software.  Mailing lists support communities of
people, not question and answer threads.  If you want forum behavior,
use forum software, or in some applications you can use an issue
tracker.  If the community prefers mailing lists, they have a reason
for that, and you're out of luck: join the community and deal with the
mail, or look for replies in the archives.

 > Is there any way to achieve that with Mailman?

Not as a subscriber, no.  Mailing lists simply don't work that way,
because they're fundamentally based on a "push" model.  The only way
to get the behavior you want is to switch to forum or tracker
software based on a "pull" model.

It's possible that in a future version of Mailman 3 a feature called
"dynamic sublists" will be available, but it is dependent on the
poster taking special action to create the thread.  It doesn't allow
you to exclude all mail except the single thread you're interested in:
to get any posts you must subscribe, and then you'll see all thread
roots.  Of course, you can already have this with an appropriately
configured threading mail client, but dynamic sublists save bandwidth
and diskspace.

Again, if you want forum behavior, convince the community to use forum
software.

Steve