[Mailman-Developers] Duplicate Prevention

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

Hello all,

We've recently taken on mailman to handle many large, popular lists at my 
day job, and one strangely-missing feature is the inability to avoid 
duplicates when someone cc's a list's old alias and new alias (we also 
moved the lists to a subdomain, out from under our primary).

It's suggested in the FAQs that this could be done using procmail -- but 
I'd think it (could/should) be done in mailman itself.

The list-id header is ideal for this, and it SEEMS to be not more than a 
dozen lines of code to do the same sort of per-list "lockfile" that the 
procmail recipe does (plus add a variable to make it tunable in either the 
config file, or the web-ui).  Presumably lockfiles could expire after 7 
days.  Locks could also be an entry in a .pck database.

The question is (and the reason I ask this on a developer list rather than 
-users) -- is there anyone here who could provide a patch to add this 
functionality, or who is interested in taking on such a task for some sort 
of compensation/donation?

Please contact me off (or on) list if anyone's available.

Another great feature would be to have mailman "strip" multiple cc 
recipients.  I.e. if a message is sent:

to: list
cc: list-alias(*), another-list-alias(*)

-or-

to: person
cc: list, list-alias(*)

To have these (*) stripped (and prevent the need for this).  But that's 
more work, and right now the duplicates are a major regression from what 
we had before.

-Dan

-- 

--------Dan Mahoney--------
Techie,  Sysadmin,  WebGeek
Gushi on efnet/undernet IRC
ICQ: 13735144   AIM: LarpGM
Site:  http://www.gushi.org
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