[Mailman-Users] setting up the mailing list

[Grant Taylor]

On 04/05/09 08:07, Rasa Isaacson wrote:
> Our organization wants to set up a mailing list in a very generic 
> fashion.  We would like to list the board members as approved members 
> using the generic emails we have set up:

So you are wanting to use ""positional addresses, not personal addresses 
(with names).  That in and of its self should be fine.

> We have a forwarder set up through our website (hosted by 
> Lunarpages--don't know if that matters) that associates the generic 
> email address to the personal email account for the board member, so 
> if a email sent to president at ourwebsite.org is received it's 
> forwarded to the appropriate personal account.

*nod* ... One possible implementation of a typical configuration.

> Is there something analogous in mailman to associate a personal email 
> account with the generic account on incoming posts to the board? Like 
> an alias, but looking at the "From:" field and translating it to the 
> generic account like president at ourwebsite.org.

It sounds to me like you are wanting to translate the From: address of 
messages as they pass through the email system in to Mailman.  I.e. 
translate from:

    barack.obama at whitehouse.gov

To:

    president at whitehouse.gov

(For the sake of conversation I'm presuming that this is indeed what you 
are wanting.)

I don't think that Mailman its self has (or should have) the ability to 
do what you are wanting.

That being said I don't see any reason that you could not put a shim / 
wrapper script in between your mail server and Mailman.  I know that it 
would be entirely possible to throw together some Perl code running a 
Regular Expression to translate barack.obama to president.  I.e.

    $From =~ m/^To: barack.obama at whitehouse.gov/To: 
president at whitehouse.gov/i;

> I hope this makes sense. Thanks.

I think I understood what you are wanting to do.  Presuming that I did, 
the short answer is that (to the best of my knowledge) Mailman does not 
include support to do what you want to do and probably should not 
either.  I think you will be much better off doing this out side of Mailman.

Now, if you are just wanting your board members to be able to send with 
either their personal addresses -OR- their positional addresses all you 
need to do is add both addresses to the mailing list (and set one to not 
receive email) as well as authorizing them to send.



Grant. . . .