[Mailman-Users] Strange address handling

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

NFN Smith writes:

 > (Note - you are subscribing to a list of mailing lists, so the
 > password notice will be sent to the admin address for your
 > membership, myaddress-owner at example.com)

This is a feature oriented to "umbrella lists".  For example, suppose
you have two departments, "Support" and "Marketing".  Some messages
need to go to Support, some to Marketing, and some to both.  The
obvious thing to do is to create a third list "SupportAndMarketing".
But this is administratively annoying because users need to deal with
two lists to get all their mail, and two sets of archives as well.

An umbrella list handles this by having SupportAndMarketing be
subscribed to not by members, but by the Support list and the
Marketing list.  Shut off SupportAndMarketing archiving, and now (1)
human users only need to worry about their departmental list and (2)
all posts relevant to each group are archived in a single place (of
course there will be duplication of archived posts in this case, but
diskspace is cheap...).

There remains one problem: passwords and other administrivia for the
members of the umbrella list.  If you treat them as ordinary list
members, then all such administrivia will get broadcast to all the
list members of the Support and Marketing lists!  If you mark it as an
"umbrella list", however, administrivia will get sent, not to the
members of the Support and Marketing lists, but to support-owner and
marketing-owner, which is what you observe here.

Why this particular list is marked as an umbrella list, I can't
guess.  Presumably you (the owner) did that, perhaps inadvertantly.

What you can do: (1) turn off the umbrella list feature, with the
possible bad effect of sublist-members getting useless administrivia,
or (2) "hide" the umbrella list from ordinary users in the web
interface by unchecking the "advertise this list" box, unsubscribe any
members who aren't sublists and resubscribe them to an appropriate
sublist.