[Mailman-Users] Target individual list member with sub-addressing when sending?

[Brad Knowles]

on 4/28/09 1:14 AM, Charles Rosenberg said:

> After receiving a message through the “reply-to” address, I want the
> original poster to be able to send a single message back to the
> “replier,” possibly answering some question.  Problem: I can’t have
> the “poster” know the individual address of the “replier,” nor can I
> have the “replier” know the direct address of the “poster.”  Would it
> be possible to use some sort of sub-addressing, extended addressing,
> plus addressing, etc. to send a message to an individual subscriber
> based on a “subscriber” username or something?  For example sending
> to Australia+KenYamaguchi at lists.seishinonline.jp would cause the
> e-mail to only go to the subscriber associated with “KenYamaguchi”
> and NOT the whole list.  This way, neither side knows the other’s
> “direct mail address.” Is this possible?  Thanks in advance.

You're talking about something we call an "anonymizer".  Mailman can do 
that to a limited degree, but only in one direction -- you permanently 
strip out the identifiable information about the sender, and then post 
the message to the list.  There's no way to get that information back.

If you want a two-way anonymizing system, that is something you would 
have to implement outside of Mailman.  There are such systems in 
existence elsewhere, but it is very tricky to get these sorts of things 
right, and you really want to make sure you do get them right in cases 
like this -- you don't want some stalker to be able to get information 
about host families or prospective students and then be able to use that 
to cause harm to them.

I'd suggest that you go find some of those two-way anonymizing systems 
and you talk to them about how you might be able to set them up 
alongside a mailing list system, and how they could potentially be used 
in conjunction with the mailing list system.

-- 
Brad Knowles
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