[Mailman-Users] Member list in header/footer

[Scott Barron]

Well, I managed to add a List-Members: header (along with the other List-*
headers in Cookheader.py).  Believe me, I think this is just as stupid an idea
as you do and will try one more time to explain the purpose of mailing list
software.  You raise some good points that I will bring up to my boss.  The
problem is he is used to maintaining his "list" as a list of addresses in
Eudora or something like that (not familiar with that software).

Thanks for the tips,
Scott

On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 09:43:27AM +0100, Nigel Metheringham wrote:
> 
> Technically this is possible to do, as outlined by Barry.
> However it is a very silly thing to do - do you want *every* member of
> the list in the headers, or just the ones handled by this delivery
> (Mailman tends to batch deliveries into chunks of recipients)?  A
> thousand recipients, at (say) 50 bytes per recipient will add 50K of
> headers.  At this point you will find some MTAs will explode when they
> get a header or a multiple header set of this length.
> 
> When someone gets a message like this and replies to it you can just bet
> they use "reply to all" - so a copy goes to the list (is that still in
> the headers) and another copy goes to each list member.  Then people
> complain about double receiving messages, of course sending the
> complaints to everyone and before you know it you have a mail loop of
> sorts and a lot of unhappy people.
> 
> Autoreply functions, which are in general terminally stupid, now have
> more addresses to autospam...
> 
> Everyone's email addresses are out there and available for spam address
> harvesters.
> 
> If you have dealings with EU people you have probably just broken EU
> data protection legislation by broadcasting personal data (email
> addresses) without adequate permissions and safeguards.
> 
> You *really* need to push back on this... mailing lists work the way
> they do for a reason, and breaking them without good technical reason
> will give you pain.
> 
>     Nigel.
> -- 
> [ Nigel Metheringham           Nigel.Metheringham at InTechnology.co.uk ]
> [ Phone: +44 1423 850000                         Fax +44 1423 858866 ]
> [ - Comments in this message are my own and not ITO opinion/policy - ]
> [ ----- Security is not an add-on -- security is a way of life ----- ]
> 
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