[Mailman-Developers] Change to acceptable_aliases

[Harald Meland]

[Barry Warsaw]

> My proposal is to change the semantics of acceptable_aliases, so that
> matching is done against the entire recipient address, not just the
> localpart.  To support backwards compatibility, I'm willing to use the
> following rules for 2.0:
> 
> 1) if the regexp does not contain an `@', then match only against the
>    localpart as before.
> 
> 2) if the regexp contains an `@', match against the entire recip
>    address.
> 
> 3) deprecate #1 so that a future release will only match against the
>    entire address.
> 
> Thoughts?

As we're talking (possibly incomprehensible) regexps here, I think I
would go a little bit further:

 1) If the regexp does not contain an '@', first try matching it
    against the localpart (i.e. the way things work now).

 2) If 1) was skipped *or* if it didn't produce a match, try matching
    against entire recip address (i.e. try this even if the regexp
    does not contain any '@' signs).

 3) Deprecate '@'-less regexps so that a future release will only
    match against the entire address.  Warn the site admin if any
    '@'-less regexps are found when upgrading to such a (future)
    version.

 4) Possibly provide a small script that iterates through
    all/specified lists, adding '@.*' to any lines in
    acceptable_aliases not containing an '@'.  Such a change _could_
    break some (strange) regexps, and thus should not be done
    automatically.

> Is anybody using acceptable_aliases?

Yes, they're used pretty much around here.  Due to the nature of our
previous mailing list system, all old lists now converted to Mailman
have quite a lot of alternative posting addresses; this led to quite a
few messages being held because of "implicit destination" right after
the conversion.
-- 
Harald