[Mailman-Users] mailman list of lists

[Bob Weissman]

At 07:55 AM 7/15/02, eluhrs at ausar.rutgers.edu wrote:
>I have a mailman list that contains the address of three other mailmain
>lists.  My hope is for this to allow me to reach all people by the main
>list, or certain groups of people by one of the sub-lists.  Here is an
>example:
>
>              |--members-faculty
>              |
>members-all---|--members-staff
>              |
>              |--members-students
>
>This would allow me to send mail to everyone, just faculty, just staff, or
>just students.  However, there are two problems with this approach.

Mailman 2.0.x is not particularly good at umbrella lists (especially if there's overlap among the sub-lists).

>1) I can send to each of these lists individually, but when I send to the
>members-all list, each sub-list holds the message for approval.  I have
>added my email address to the list of "Addresses of members accepted for
>posting", and member_posting_only is set to "yes".  My understanding is
>that even though I do not belong to either of these lists, I will be
>allowed to send to all of them.  And this is indeed the case, as long as I
>am not sending via members-all.  My guess is that mailman is the re-sender
>in such a case, and is not allowed to post without permission.  Is this
>the case?  And if so, how do I change it?

Have you got require_explicit_destination set on the Privacy Options page? If so, you need to add members-all at your\.domain to the acceptable_addresses field for each sub-list.

>2) Once I approve the messages to be sent to the sub-lists, the subject
>line lists both list names like this:
>
>        [members-all][members-x] my subject
>
>where x is either faculty, staff, or student.  I would like each sub-list
>to show its name ONLY if it is mailed to directly, but not if it is mailed
>to from the main list.  I don't think this is possible, but if it is,
>please let me know.

Not possible without serious code-hacking. What I suggest is eliminating the tag from the "all" list. Then subscribers will see only the tag for the list they are on. In a similar vein, you probably want to remove any footer information pointing to the "all" list, since subscribers can't maintain their own data on that list anyway.

In fact, there may be no need to have members-all be a full-fledged list. Perhaps it can be a simple alias pointing to the sub-lists.

- Bob