[Mailman-Users] using topics

[Lucio Chiappetti]

I am one of the co-moderators of a restricted discussion list within our 
organization (a nationwide research institution). The list is restricted 
in the sense posting is allowed to subscribers only, and subscription is 
allowed only to staff, associates, and former members.

So far we allowed also communications from the trade unions, in the sense 
they post a (signed) message from a non member account, it stops into 
moderation and one of the co-moderator lets it pass. We could have used 
also accept_these_nonmembers (as we do for recognized subscribers who post 
from alternate addresses) but since the various trade unions 
correspondents did not use a fixed address we did not do it.

Now the trade unions requested to be allowed to subscribe as regular users 
from a fixed address, which would relieve us moderators from the need of 
manual acceptance.

I hope this won't cause an excess of trade union related messages with 
respect to other messages, which can be resented by some of our users.

I thought one possibility was to enable "topics", to allow users to decide 
whether they want to see such messages or not.

I have some questions about topics.

- can a user select to receive all messages EXCLUDING a particular
   topic ? It looks like the interface allows to subscribe to one topic,
   and also to receive topic-less messages ... but what about one
   wants to receive ONLY topic-less messages ?

   Assuming messages are classified as :

    - topic trade union
    - no topic

   Shall one create a dummy placeholder topic which will be never
   populated ? or how can one assign a default topic ?

- can the mailman administrator assign topics based on the originator
   address instead of Subject or Keyword or regexp in the first n lines ?

   This may allow to tag the topics automatically (instead of relying on
   the originator using special tags, which is sort of hopeless)


If it helps, the list is managed by mailman 2.1.12 and is not on a 
computer in my institute (I have 2.1.14 on my machine which I use for 
other lists). Neither me nor the administrators of the central site are 
keen to change. but if a more recent version is more suited for this sort 
of filtering we might consider it.

Thanks

-- 
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Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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