[Mailman-Developers] Change to acceptable_aliases

J C Lawrence claw@cp.net
Wed, 26 Apr 2000 13:39:34 -0700


On Wed, 26 Apr 2000 12:01:13 -0500 (CDT) 
Christopher Lindsey <lindsey@ncsa.uiuc.edu> wrote:

>> allow header_From matching @\S*\buio.no deny has_header
>> X-RBL-Warning deny size > 1MB hold size > 40k allow header_From
>> in members hold * # default
>> 
>> Of course, a big concern is whether implementing such a beast
>> will make "filtering configuration" of Mailman lists too strange
>> (or even obfuscated) for most list admins.

> Personally, I don't think this has a place in Mailman.  Why
> reinvent the wheel?  You can easily wrap an alias with a procmail
> recipe that natively supports this in a language designed to
> filter mail.  It's the UNIX way: awk | sed | sort -rn, not piping
> everything into sort and expecting it to do it all...  :) The
> exception, of course, is the wonderfully compact emacs suite.

Much tho I like ACLs in list servers (I had a rather alrge
collection of them when I ran petidomo), I largely agree.

> Of course, a wrapper is much better suited to denying than
> allowing message through -- to make it work, one would have to
> allow everything in Mailman and expect the wrappers to handle it
> all.  However, you could have the procmail/maildrop/script filter
> add an Approved: header if the messsage is indeed valid, which
> Mailman would pick up on...

Adding a single feature to Mailman would probably do the trick for
everybody here:

  A command line switch to the wrapper script such that the mail
  arriving on stdin will be posted, no matter what any other
  configuration settings specify.  Perhaps "post-approved" in
  addition to "post", "mailowner", "mailcmd" etc.

Do *that*, and you can pretty well do anything at all in a
procmail/maildrop/whatever pre-filter and get any desired behaviour
out of it.

-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder@kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...