[Mailman-Users] Duplicate detection: a plea

[Dan Mahoney, System Admin]

We recently moved over to mailman from Ecartis at $dayjob, and one of the 
largest annoyances is that mailman seems to have no ability to strip 
duplicate messages that are sent to the lists.

We moved over from our main domain name, foo.com, to lists.foo.com, so 
what happens is this:

A user posts to list at foo.com -- the mailer forwards it to 
list at lists.foo.com.  People reply to the list and hit reply-all, which 
directs replies to the LIST (listname at lists.foo.com) but also to the 
original recipient (list at foo.com).  Bam, duplicates.

I don't want to get into an evangelical holy-war about reply-all.  We 
already had it here.

I've seen mention of a fix for this via procmail, that basically creates a 
"lockfile" based on the message-id.  Our mail server's not running 
procmail, and since it's only hosting lists, not and mailboxes, it doesn't 
make a whole lot of sense to use it.

All mailman would have to do is touch a per-list lockfile based on 
message-id (one line of shell), and then at some point in the posting 
process, if that lockfile exists, drop the message (as it's already come 
through).  Cleanup is one line of shell (find foo -ctime xxx -delete) or 
can be handled from the qrunner.

Heck, if you want to be fancy, give me a list of regexes that match 
recipients, and more than one must match to make this happen.

I also tried sending this to the -developers list.  No response.  But 
maybe that's the wrong place since I'm not developing, or submitting a 
patch.  Just saying I need a simple feature and could pay something for it 
if need be.  Not something amazing, but enough for a nice dinner and 
drinks (or if you're local to silicon valley, I'll buy).

Can mailman please have this functionality natively?

-Dan

-- 


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