[Mailman-Developers] Two new features, partially cooked

[Barry A. Warsaw]

I wanted to get this in now so that people can play with them.  I will
likely be unresponsive to email over the next week to 10 days, so
apologies in advance.

First, I had a brainstorm about how to do personalized email, at least
for regular deliveries.  I think this is essentially what people who
do announce-only lists feel is missing.  It's not really VERP, it's
not tied into the bounce detector, and it doesn't (currently) work for
digest deliveries, but it does allow you to add headers and footers
which have %()s expansions personalized for each recipient.

As guessed, personalized lists mean that Mailman makes a copy of the
message for each recipient, so it explodes the work being done by
#msgs x #recips.  The details for the option (look under "Non-digest
deliveries") try to explain the implications of turning this on.  Note
that the site administrator must explicitly enable personalized lists
by setting OWNERS_CAN_ENABLE_PERSONALIZATION.

Second, I've wormed around the bogus problem with password reminders
coming from a random public list.  Here's how it currently works:

- you must create a "site list" which by default is "mailman", but
  which you can really give any name as long as you change
  MAILMAN_SITE_LIST.

- For each virtual host, the password reminders look like they're
  coming from mailman-request@vhost, where "mailman-request" is really
  MAILMAN_SITE_LIST-request.

- MAILMAN_OWNER is gone as a configuration variable.  Wherever it was
  referenced before, Mailman now uses MAILMAN_SITE_LIST, with the
  host_name coerced to whatever vhost is appropriate (either based on
  the mailing list the action is being taken on, or the host name as
  calculated from the web request).

This seems to work, and I think is better than the old approach, but
it's not perfect.  For one thing, MAILMAN_SITE_LIST is just a normal
old list; there's nothing special about it except that it's named in
MAILMAN_SITE_LIST.  Second, we're relying on the, er, feature that
listnames share a namespace across vhosts, so MAILMAN_SITE_LIST@vhost1
== MAILMAN_SITE_LIST@vhost2.  Post MM2.1, when we have true virtual
hosting, this will have to be fixed, and MAILMAN_SITE_LIST will likely
be made special.  Also, nothing checks to make sure this site list
exists, so at the very least the installation docs will have to make
it clear you need to create this list (possibly as a way to test your
Mailman installation, so that could work fairly well).

Anyway, neither feature is ideally implemented, but I think it's the
best I can do for now.  I know there'll be lots of room for
improvement, but I'd like to know if you think these will work for
MM2.1 as they are, or if something's fundamentally bolluxed about
them.

Check-ins coming soon -- I need to eat first! :)

Thanks,
-Barry