[Mailman-Users] Automatic subscription based on e-mail subject

[tlhackque]

On 31-Jan-19 05:11, R. Diez wrote:
> Hi all:
>
> I have the following recurring problem with mailing lists all over the
> Internet: people do reply to my posts, by they do not address or copy
> me in their replies. They send their e-mails only to the mailing list.
> Or they reply to the previous reply, and forget to copy the original
> poster.
>
> So I do not get a copy of the relevant messages straight away. If need
> to manually fish their answers from the web interface. If there is
> one. And then composing e-mails is cumbersome. And the subject
> threading no longer works properly.
>
> This problem has annoyed me (and other people on the Internet) for a
> long time.
>
> I cannot subscribe to every mailing list I need to occasionally use.
> It's far too much. This e-mail is the perfect example of such a
> come-ask-and-go-again scenario.
>
> If I need to subscribe in order to post a question, I turn off mail
> delivery straight away.
>
> Getting a digest with all e-mails does not help either. Replying to a
> single e-mail in this mode is cumbersome too. Besides, I do not want
> to manually skip other messages which do not interest me.
>
> Other forum software has a nice feature for this scenario: If I post
> to a subject, I am automatically subscribed to that subject. I then
> get an e-mail for any new posts with the same subject.
>
> The "topic" feature in Mailman is different. Very few people use it. I
> need something based on the e-mail subject.
>
> Is there any way to achieve that with Mailman?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>   rdiez
>
>
While I sympathize, I should also point out that this behavior goes
against the underlying philosophy of many mailing lists.

In that context, it is viewed as "selfish" to only ask for help while
never providing any.  If you don't read the list, you can't offer help
to others.  You don't have to be an 'expert' to be able to answer
questions, or to help an 'expert' to understand a novice's point of
view.  Communities are built from cooperation.

It should be up to a list owner to decide whether or not to enable a
feature that facilitates "take but don't give" behavior.  The list norms
should decide if "ask and run" or "ignore everyone else" is considered
anti-social/exploitive or acceptable use. 

In my experience, people paid to support a product might be happy with
the feature enabled, while a volunteer community might oppose it. 

Of course, today you can subscribe to the list and put a client-side
filter in your MUA that discards any post that doesn't reference your
post.  (By subject or "References" header.)  That doesn't require any
new support in Mailman.