[Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman generated mails

[Somuchfun]

Hello Barry,
Let me try to explain why the additional header is so important.
When you use large lists with lots of traffic to AOL they can set you on
something that is called an "feedback loop". This loop creates automated
emails from AOL's postmaster about people on one of your list (as an ISP)
who have clicked the "spam" button in regards to one of the messages
originating from you.
But due to privacy reasons the recipient of the email will be stripped out
of the feedback loop message. So AOL advises to use secret headers to
identify who the person who complained is.
This is crucial because it only takes 1 complaint per 1000 recipients for
AOL to put an automated temporary block on your ip address that results in
bouncing of all traffic.
Of course I could just add a mail merge code in the footer of the message
but that only seems to work with full VERP enabled in mailman and the
slowdown is so dramatic that it is no longer feasible for a list of 50,000
or more.
So what I would like to see are two things:
1. One make the codes like %(user_delivered_to)s in the footer work without
VERP enabled
2. Have the option in the GUI to add headers and use for example
%(user_delivered_to)s in it

Kind of connected to this is the problem that the GUI does not allow to show
all suspended members of a list and on a list with 50,000 members it makes
no sense to go through them page by page to find out who got suspended
because of a bounce.

And then an additional problem is that mailman does not take out
x-AuthenticatedSender headers from the poster of the message. And this
header added by auth smtp reveals very clearly who the sender is even when
the list is set to anonymous posting!

I hope this helps make mailman better and stronger!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Barry Warsaw [mailto:barry at python.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, January 20, 2004 2:28 PM
> To: Somuchfun
> Cc: mailman-developers at python.org
> Subject: Re: [Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman 
> generated mails
> 
> On Tue, 2004-01-20 at 15:30, Somuchfun wrote:
> > I have a problem that might affect lots of people who send 
> emails to large
> > lists.
> > AOL requires an additional header in the emails identifying 
> the recipient
> > for the feedback loops to unsubscribe AOL users who complain.
> > So how do I add an additional header with a field?
> 
> Can you describe this additional header in more detail?  Better yet
> would be some documentation on the web describing this 
> header.  I.e. if
> it's a standard (or maybe even a proposed standard), perhaps Mailman
> should support it out of the box.
> 
> It's actually pretty easy to add such a header.  One option is to just
> include the header in the original message.  Or you can get Mailman to
> add it to every message by modifying the code in the pipeline.  The
> place to start would be Mailman/Handlers/CookHeaders.py.  That's where
> the RFC 2369 headers are added for example.
> 
> -Barry
> 
> 
>