[Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman generated mails

[Brad Knowles]

At 2:56 PM -0800 2004/01/21, Somuchfun wrote:

>  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.

	If you're not using VERP and you need per-recipient data in the 
headers, then there is absolutely nothing that mailman can do to help 
you.  Mailman will pass the message to the MTA in chunks of 50 or 100 
(or whatever you specify), and you could not encode all those 
recipient names in the headers without exposing a great deal of 
privacy information about your recipients.

	Moreover, once the message was delivered to the user's mailbox, 
just by looking at the message and header contents there would be no 
way to distinguish between any of the 50 or 100 recipients.

	You could configure your MTA to add per-recipient information 
after splitting incoming envelopes so that it delivers a separate 
message for each, but this would be as bad as enabling VERP (for the 
same reasons) and would not give you the benefit of managing bounces 
much more easily, etc....

>  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

	No can do.  When you have 50 recipients, which one should have 
their name inserted into this field?

>  2. Have the option in the GUI to add headers and use for example
>  %(user_delivered_to)s in it

	Again, not possible.  Mailman doesn't have the control at that 
point -- the MTA does.  And if you want to keep your network traffic 
to a reasonable level and keep the MTA from beating the hell out of 
your disk drives as it delivers each copy of the message, then 
there's not much you can do.

	I don't understand how AOL expects people to accomplish this sort 
of thing (and I used to be their Sr. Internet Mail Systems 
Administrator).  Maybe I need to talk to Carl Hutzler.

>  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!

	Mailman has taken a pretty strong stance towards not munging the 
message any more than absolutely necessary.  Message body content may 
be filtered or converted, but in particular the headers are 
considered sacrosanct and will not be touched.  This same approach 
can be found in all major MTAs that I know of.

	If you want to configure your MTA to strip certain headers, that 
should be possible, and you should have the option of doing that. 
But I don't think you should be expecting Mailman to do this job for 
you.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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