[Mailman-Users] mailman list of lists

[eluhrs at ausar.rutgers.edu]

Thanks Bob!  Your suggestions fixed both of my problems.

Eric


Bob Weissman sent this on Jul 15:

>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
>