[Mailman-Developers] Change to acceptable_aliases

[Christopher Lindsey]

 No, I think I misunderstood your original proposal.  Sorry about that.
> 
> +1 on Harald's approach, with a provision to remove #1 in some future
> version.

About a year ago I sent out a proposal to the list about this that
I think might still have some merit.  Rather than doing regular
expression matching, why not do regex plus substitution?  That
would allow admins to create rules like
   
   '\+[^@]' ' '

which essentially converts all plus-addressed subscriptions to 
a non-plus-addressed format, thereby fixing the existing problem
with plus-addressing.

Unfortunately, if it's left in acceptable_aliases it will go
ahead and approve anybody with plus-addressing.  :)  So what
do people think about creating another option in the privacy
settings entitled sub_regex?  Basically, all email addresses
would be transformed with this regex before going to 
acceptable_aliases.

What does this buy me?

I could have a sub_regex setting like 

   '@.*\.ncsa\.uiuc\.edu$' '@ncsa.uiuc.edu'

followed by an acceptable_alias setting of

   @ncsa\.uiuc\.edu$

Now anyone at ncsa.uiuc.edu can post to the list, whether or not
their hostname shows up in their address, etc.  Likewise,

   '^lindsey@[^@]+$' 'lindsey@ncsa.uiuc.edu'

would accept email from anyone who's email address starts with
'lindsey@'.  

Sure, you can shoot yourself in the foot.  Sure, you can open up
your list.  But the extra power far outweighs the potentially stupid
things that people can do with it.  :)

Chris

Chris