At 2:56 PM -0800 2004/01/21, Somuchfun wrote:

 Of course I could just add a mail merge code in the footer of the message
 but that only seems to work with full VERP enabled in mailman and the
 slowdown is so dramatic that it is no longer feasible for a list of 50,000
 or more.

If you're not using VERP and you need per-recipient data in the headers, then there is absolutely nothing that mailman can do to help you. Mailman will pass the message to the MTA in chunks of 50 or 100 (or whatever you specify), and you could not encode all those recipient names in the headers without exposing a great deal of privacy information about your recipients.


Moreover, once the message was delivered to the user's mailbox, just by looking at the message and header contents there would be no way to distinguish between any of the 50 or 100 recipients.

You could configure your MTA to add per-recipient information after splitting incoming envelopes so that it delivers a separate message for each, but this would be as bad as enabling VERP (for the same reasons) and would not give you the benefit of managing bounces much more easily, etc....

 So what I would like to see are two things:
 1. One make the codes like %(user_delivered_to)s in the footer work without
 VERP enabled

No can do. When you have 50 recipients, which one should have their name inserted into this field?


 2. Have the option in the GUI to add headers and use for example
 %(user_delivered_to)s in it

Again, not possible. Mailman doesn't have the control at that point -- the MTA does. And if you want to keep your network traffic to a reasonable level and keep the MTA from beating the hell out of your disk drives as it delivers each copy of the message, then there's not much you can do.


I don't understand how AOL expects people to accomplish this sort of thing (and I used to be their Sr. Internet Mail Systems Administrator). Maybe I need to talk to Carl Hutzler.

 And then an additional problem is that mailman does not take out
 x-AuthenticatedSender headers from the poster of the message. And this
 header added by auth smtp reveals very clearly who the sender is even when
 the list is set to anonymous posting!

Mailman has taken a pretty strong stance towards not munging the message any more than absolutely necessary. Message body content may be filtered or converted, but in particular the headers are considered sacrosanct and will not be touched. This same approach can be found in all major MTAs that I know of.


If you want to configure your MTA to strip certain headers, that should be possible, and you should have the option of doing that. But I don't think you should be expecting Mailman to do this job for you.

--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
    -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

GCS/IT d+(-) s:+(++)>: a C++(+++)$ UMBSHI++++$ P+>++ L+ !E-(---) W+++(--) N+
!w--- O- M++ V PS++(+++) PE- Y+(++) PGP>+++ t+(+++) 5++(+++) X++(+++) R+(+++)
tv+(+++) b+(++++) DI+(++++) D+(++) G+(++++) e++>++++ h--- r---(+++)* z(+++)

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