[Mailman-Users] Signature and subscriptions

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Steve Sokol writes:

 > When we send messages, there is an attachment which is the
 > signature which would normally appear at the bottom of the list.
 > Simple question: How can I make it a signature instead of an
 > attachment?

The basic answer is "there is no reliable way to accomplish that"; it
is the responsibility of the mail client to correctly interpret the
mail received according to the Internet standards.  Many common ones
(most notoriously, the Microsoft Outlook family) don't come close.

The most successful approach is to have Mailman strip out HTML or
convert it to plain text before adding the footer.  This is rarely
acceptable to users, unfortunately.

I think somebody has written an extension to add headers and footers
by actually editing HTML parts.  This is bad idea for more reasons
than I have fingers to count them on, but it may be the least bad
solution as far as your users are concerned.

 > I should mention that we are using the Mailman that comes with
 > Cpanel, which is probably a very "vanilla" implementation.  I
 > assume there are levels of implementation.

No, Cpanel's distribution of Mailman is heavily hacked and we don't
have access to their code.  I don't think the kind of changes they
make should affect the things you're interested in, but we have no way
of knowing.

No, there are no levels of implementation in Mailman as we distribute
it.  You get what you get.

 > Second question: When people join our organization, they can select
 > one or more mailing lists in which to participate.  We do not want
 > them able to subscribe from outside the membership data base.  [Our
 > moderators ill add them.  For now, we are set up to force
 > moderation of the subscription.  Can we stop the system to not even
 > allow subscription.

I have not tested this, but putting the single line

^.*

in the ban list (Privacy->Subscription Rules->ban_list in the web
administration interface, assuming cPanel hasn't hacked that) should
do the trick.