[Mailman-Developers] Making passwords easier for users

[Owen Taylor]

We recently switched over the GNOME mailing lists to 
Mailman, and it was a quite easy transition. So far,
everything is working nicely.


The most common problem problem that people seem to have 
is password management. Quite a few people try to 
unsubscribe without a password, and when they get an
error message back, resort to mailing the mail admin
address and asking the owner to do it. 

And in fact, none of the mail help text makes any reference
about how one can find out ones password. I could
add a pointer to the how to do it via the web in the
help text, but it seems simpler to simply mail out
a password reminder when a users command fails
because they

  a) didn't include a password 
  b) included the wrong password

(The password could even be put directly into the response
if the address that the request comes from is the same
as the address the command pertained to.)

However, since this idea seems pretty obvious to me, and
yet it isn't already, I thought I would ask if there
is any reason I'm missing why it should not be done,
before I went off and did it.


The other password related modification I was thinking of doing
locally here is a little bit more radical - making it so that all
passwords for a given email address are interchangable. Quite a few
people are subscribed to 10-15 different gnome.org mailing lists, and
when they were moved over, they were assigned a different password for
each list.

(If I had planned it better, I would have written a custom
add_members script so that people, at least initially,
would have the same password for each list.)

Of course, IMO, the best thing would be to have just a single
password per user, but making the passwords for each list
interchangeable is a good step in the right direction.

Again, I'd like opinions about whether this is just a bad
idea or not.

Regards,
                                        Owen