[Mailman-Users] managing pending subscriptions and confirmations

[Mark Sapiro]

Jan Steinman wrote:
>
>I have successfully gone through the subscription process with several  
>alias addresses, so I know that it works -- at least from within my LAN.
>
>I can only surmise that the confirmation messages are languishing in  
>people's spam mailbox.


Or they are discarding or ignoring them because they don't realize what
they are.


>Any clues, hints, or techniques for having mailman self-subscriptions  
>without getting the confirmation stuck in spam filters?


First, you need to determine if that is really the problem.


>I tried using the "listname-join" email address technique, but the  
>confirmation comes back as from "listname-request", so it seems spam  
>filters that allow replies to addresses previously sent to won't help  
>here. Is there a way to make the "From:" address "listname-join"  
>instead? (This should not cause any problems, because "Reply-To:"  
>would still be "listname-request".)


There are two kinds of confirmations depending on the setting of
VERP_CONFIRMATIONS in Defaults.py/mm_cfg.py. The default is No. With
this setting, the confirmation is From: listname-request and the
subject is "confirm xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" where the x's
are a 40 character hex confirmation token.

With = Yes, the from/reply-to is
listname-confirm+xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx and the subject is
'Your confirmation is required to join the <listname> mailing list'

There are potential problems with either of these. The first format is
easily overlooked by the recipient because the subject isn't
meaningful to her. The second format may cause problems in delivery
back to Mailman if the Mailman incoming MTA doesn't recognize the '+'
as a special delimiter in the local part of the address.

If you are using the default format, I suggest you set
VERP_CONFIRMATIONS = Yes in mm_cfg.py, and verify that the resulting
confirmations are properly handled by your MTA, and see if that helps.

If you really want to change the From:, you have to edit
Mailman/MailList.py, but if the only reason for doing this is to make
the From: in the confirmation request equal to the To: in the
preceding subscription request, it would be easier to request
subscription by sending an email with subject 'subscribe' to the
listname-request address.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan