[Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman generated mails

[Somuchfun]

Brad,
While I understand part of your rationale this is really creating a big
problem for people running large lists and try to handle their email traffic
in an ethical way.
Is there a problem to send out the emails one by one with individual To:
addresses and then add a header or a mail merge field in the footer without
creating bounce addresses that most MTA do not allow or understand?
I do not mind the additional CPU time for sending out the messages one by
one if it solves the problem for right now. But since the VERP bounce back
addresses do not really exist an Exim with verify = recipient will always
have a problem.
So is there a way to tweak Exim into sending the messages individually and
allow the addition of a personalized footer without creating personalized
bounce-back addresses?

Thanks!

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Brad Knowles [mailto:brad.knowles at skynet.be] 
> Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 4:24 PM
> To: Somuchfun
> Cc: mailman-developers at python.org; 'Barry Warsaw'
> Subject: RE: [Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman 
> generated mails
> 
> 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.
> 
> GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ 
> !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
> !w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) 
> X++(+++) R+(+++)
> tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- 
> r---(+++)* z(+++)
>