[Mailman-Users] New to the List Serve - responding to posts issue

[Brad Knowles]

on 4/3/09 1:29 PM, Robert McGuire said:

> I just setup a list serve for my community's board of directors.  I
> have all of the permissions set correctly and only the board are
> members.  Everyone in community are non-members where their posts are
> held for approval.

Someone is going to say it, so I'll try to be as nice as I can about it. 
  I'm sure you're new to this software, but "ListServ" is actually a 
particular brand of mailing list software, but it's not our brand.

Here in the Mailman community, we don't call them a "list serve".  We 
call them mailing lists.


I hope that by being the first to say this, I can pre-empt anyone else 
from being ... not so understanding.

> My issues is:  When someone on the list responds to a post, their
> response comes from their personal email address.  If the request
> originator does not "reply to all", then the list serve is cut out of
> the loop.
> 
> My question is:  For members of the list, is there a way for them to
> respond directly from the list serve?  That way the address that
> responses come from are always the list serve address and not their
> personal address.

There are ways to force all replies to go back to the mailing list, yes. 
  However, the Mailman developers are pretty strongly opposed to using 
these methods in most cases -- this tends to lead to public exposure of 
messages that were meant to be sent privately, and that can be far, far 
more damaging than the reverse.

I've even seen experienced mail systems administrators with twenty-plus 
years of experience make this mistake.  And accidentally expose 
proprietary details of a product that should not have been publicly 
mentioned, at least not yet.


If you can convince me that you've got a case where this kind of thing 
isn't an issue, I'll be glad to point you to the documentation that 
discusses this subject.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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