[Mailman-Users] Alternatives to having a list own itself

[Kelly Jones]

I'm part of a group of people ("sysops") that own several
lists. Because the group changes occasionally, we've created a Mailman
list called "sysops at foo.com", and all of our lists are owned by
"sysops at foo.com". The sysops list also receives other
(non-Mailman-generated) emails.

We tried to make sysops owned by itself, but ran into problems: a
spammer emailed sysops, and the mail was held for moderation. However,
the "sysops post requires approval" message came from sysops-bounces
and went to sysops: Mailman apparently detected a loop and didn't
deliver the message (either that, or Mailman automatically rejects
emails that come from a list itself?)

To be honest, we didn't investigate too deeply: we know that the
sysops list works great for the most part, but doesn't work when we
make it own itself. We even tried cheating by using an alias: we had
"bar at foo.com" forward to "sysops at foo.com" and then made the list owned
by "bar at foo.com", but Mailman figured out our trickery and somehow
disallowed it.

My question: what's the best way to handle a situation like this? Have
a list owned by itself or "effectively" owned by itself. An obvious
hack is to run "list_members sysops" in a cron job and then dump the
results into the 'owner' field, but this seems ugly, especially if
you're using topics (at any given time, only a subset of sysops may
decide to receive "message pending approval" type messages).

Is this the Mailman version of Russell's paradox?

-- 
We're just a Bunch Of Regular Guys, a collective group that's trying
to understand and assimilate technology. We feel that resistance to
new ideas and technology is unwise and ultimately futile.