[Mailman-Users] Auto discard non-members messages

[Mark Sapiro]

Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

>>>>>> "Mark" == Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net> writes:
>
>    Mark> What do you consider a subscribe request? If you mean a
>    Mark> message sent to the list posting address
>    Mark> (listname at example.com) with a subject or message body saying
>    Mark> "please subscribe me" or something like that, then you can't
>    Mark> do what you want because these messages will be discarded
>    Mark> like any other non-member post.
>
>This is probably true, but it doesn't need to be.  Normally the lists
>filter administrivia.  So if you put the administrivia filter HOLD
>before the non-member filter DISCARD, Daevid should win here, too.

All that needs to be done to do administrivia filtering before
non-member reject/discard is to rearrange the GLOBAL_PIPELINE (in
mm_cfg.py) to put 'hold' before 'moderate', or create a 'pipeline'
attribute for the list which is like GLOBAL_PIPELINE but with 'hold'
before 'moderate'. However, this will have other effects which may or
may not be undesirable. Thus, a patch to just move the administrivia
test might be preferable.

The real problem, and the reason I didn't mention administrivia in my
original reply, is I don't think the administrivia filter as it
currently exists is going to be very effective for arbitrary "I want
to subscribe" requests sent to the list posting address. It only
catches things that look like syntactically correct commands.=, i.e.,
lines that look like

keyword arg list

where 'keyword' is a command and 'arg list' is an appropriaite length
for the command. Thus it will catch a message with subject or a body
line

subscribe me

but it won't catch

please subscribe me

or even

subscribe me to this list

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