John

On 19 Feb 2004, at 16:55, John Grunder wrote:

Thanks for the advice Richard. Does turning on the Administrative filter
force Mailman to check for administrative commands in the subject line
only? I get the sense that some of the list members trying to get off of
the list simply enter a phrase such as "Yes, unsubscribe me from the list
too!". I am sure that this comes from the body of the message, rather
than the subject line.



The code that does the checking is a function called is_administrivia() in the file $prefix/Mailman/Utils.py


From a quick look at the Python code (which is quite legible if you want to take a look yourself) it appears to check both the subject line and the first 5 lines of the message body.

The check applied is to look for any of a set of words defined as keys to a dictionary called ADMINDATA in $prefix/Mailman/Utils.py. These include unsubscribe, subscribe and others from the lexicon of email in commands that are majordomo'ish.

The criteria that appear to be applied are that the first word of the subject or one of the first 5 body line is one of the key words and the number of words following that keyword on the line are between limits prescribed by min and max values in ADMINDATA associated with that keyword.

So, your "Yes, unsubscribe me from the list too!" example would be missed, but a simple "UnSubScriBe" would be detected as administrivia.

It should be quite simple to modify the algorithm to allow the key word to be the zeroth to some configurable n'th word on the line which might work better for you but I would want to add some checks, say on the maximum number of non-blank lines in the body and such to avoid generating too many false positives for administrivia from legitimate messages. It might also be worth opening up the number of words that can follow the keyword.

If you want me to send you a modified version of $prefix/Mailman/Utils.py incorporating my thoughts then let me know.

I think we have some people that just can't follow directions.


Tell me about it. First you have to get them to read it, then to understand it; I am uncertain as to which is the more difficult. Still without the users where would we be: happy and out of work :)


Regards

Richard

Richard Barrett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:

On 18 Feb 2004, at 20:18, John Grunder wrote:


Has anyone seen a situation in Mailmain 2.1 where administrative
requests
(subscribe, unsubscribe) might be forwarded back to the unmoderated
list,
and thereby to the general list members?

Is there a setting which could make this happen?

The "(Administrivia filter) Check postings and ...?", the administrivia
option, on the General Options web admin GUI page for a list will
affect detection of administrative messages sent to a list's primary
mail alias. If turned off this will prevent the administrivia filter
operating and ensure that, for instance, subscribe and unsubscribe
requests are not diverted from the list to the list admin.


The default for this list attribute is controlled on list creation by
the value of the DEFAULT_ADMINISTRIVIA configuration variable in the
$prefix/Mailman/Defaults.py/mm_cfg.py


We have a list which was converted over from Majordomo last month to
Mailman and now all of the members are being flooded with messages from
the list requesting to unsubscribe. Since this overloads other
member's
mailboxes, they too are asking to unsubscribe, and the wave builds. We
need to stop this somehow.

Why not send a message to the list with a mailto link to the listname-unsubscribe mail alias and text reminding people to use that alias to unsubscribe.


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