[Mailman-Users] public and private messages in the same archive?

[Mark Sapiro]

Jack Bates wrote:
>
>Is there any way to make some messages public and others private, in the
>same list archive?
>
>It's OK for all messages' subjects to be public in the archive index, so
>long as following the link to view private messages requires a password
>
>One thought was to make <list-name>-private at campcoop.com an alias of
><list-name>@campcoop.com, then have a cron job periodically crawl the
>archive and regenerate .htaccess files to require passwords to access
>any messages sent to <list-name>-private at campcoop.com


You can't do it with .htaccess files because you will have both
'public' and 'private' messages in the same directory and the
.htaccess file will apply to all of them.

The only way I can think of to do this is to make the archive private
and modify Mailman/Cgi/private.py to not require authentication to see
the indices for this list or to serve those messages which it somehow
identifies as 'public' (or make a separate CGI to do this).

I suppose another way would be to have a public archive, but remove the
world read permission from the private message's html files. This
would be cumbersome though because one would access the archive via
the 'pipermail' URL and then get a '402 Forbidden' when attempting to
access a private message, and then one would have to use the 'private'
URL to access a private message. If I were a list member in this case,
I would just always use the 'private' URL and avoid the issue.

You could probably do the permission removal with something based on
the template in the FAQ at <http://wiki.list.org/x/RAKJ>.

Do you really think in practice that it will be important to allow
non-list-members access to the archive?

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