On Mon, 2011-05-23 at 15:03 +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > Of course, some things have to involve Mailman (eg, filtering posts on > list membership). But even there, the developers consider it a design > bug that Mailman has no way to export its member database to filtering > software at the MTA level (which would make it possible to reject a > post based on the From: nonmember + To: list combination without ever > accepting the mail, among many other potential applications). This is > being remedied in Mailman 3.
I haven't been following Mailman 3 development plans, and that's good to hear! I've been intending to do this out of a cron job, so that Exim can refuse at SMTP time mail that it knows the destination list would refuse anyway. That reminds me of something I've sort of been wishing for for a bit, which would be the ability to expose arbitrary new list-specific variables to list admins which would be stored in the list pickle. The obvious example is a SpamAssassin threshold over which to refuse mail to the list. We have lots of standard general-purpose lists, but we also have some lists which *discuss* spam and/or security threats, which need a higher score. Other examples would be a list of languages the list accepts, what sorts of attachments to allow, and the like. Obviously, there are other ways to get this sort of information to the MTA and/or filtering software, but treating these things as list attributes, with the same web interface as all the other list attributes, would make things easy on list maintainers. I'm guessing this sort of thing is not possible without code changes to Mailman (forgive my lack of understanding of the Mailman codebase), but if the web UI is in whole or in part programmatically generated, it might be possible already -- and if not, a way for site or list administrators to add arbitrary variables to a list (even if the Mailman codebase doesn't do anything with them itself) might be a useful feature to consider for Mailman 3, especially if there's a general facility for making them available to MTAs. (For all I know, of course, this may already be in the works.) Jay ------------------------------------------------------ Mailman-Users mailing list Mailman-Users@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-users/archive%40jab.org
