On 2 Jun 2013, at 11:50, Tanstaafl wrote:
On 2013-06-01 1:40 PM, Bill Cole wrote:
It is altogether always wrong for ANY mail software outside of a
domain
to parse the local part of an address in that domain except for a
tiny
handful of standard special local parts (e.g. "postmaster").
On it's own, I agree.
The use of '+' as a tag delimiter is widespread but it is not in any
sense a "standard" and comes nowhere near universality. There is no
way for a Mailman instance to know which domains make "user+tag" and
"user" equivalent and which do not, so canonicalizing as you suggest
would result in breakage.
Currently factually and technically correct, But...
There is no reason that Mailman couldn't be enhanced with a
configurable *option* that would allow the domain Admin to *tell* it
which character(s) (there was recent talk on the postfix list of
postfix being enhanced to allow multiple characters to be defined as
this delimiter) were to be used as delimiters.
There's no reason MM *couldn't* be "enhanced" in many ways that it never
*should* be. It's reasonably well-structured open source Python after
all...
Beyond a few formally standardized cases, assuming equivalency between
different address local parts in a foreign domain is wrong in principle
and bad in practice. Postfix's recipient_delimiter has nothing to do
with foreign domain addresses, it is only relevant to addresses in
domains for which Postfix handles delivery. It is also worth noting one
thing mentioned in that thread: it is trivial to replicate the
functionality of having multiple delimiter characters with regular
expression alias maps.
The original poster's difficulty was that MM did not see "user@domain"
as a valid confirmer of a subscription by "user+tag@domain" but it would
be profoundly wrong for MM to do so. Making MM recognize multiple tag
delimiters would multiply the wrongness. The solution for that original
problem is not in MM, it is for people using tagged addresses to have
the right mix of tools and presence of mind to send mail using a
suitable address for each message, i.e. if you subscribe to a MM list as
"user+tag", you need to confirm the subscription from "user+tag", NOT
"user".
There would be less of a problem with a subscriber-specific setting that
would allow confirmed subscribers to tell MM that it should treat some
pattern of tagged addresses as equivalent to their subscribed address.
That would not address the OP's complaint, but it could help for people
who are error-prone in how they send mail.
I would love to see this ability in MM3...
To solve what problem?
I abandoned simple tagging years ago precisely because of would-be mail
wizards who thought it could be useful to programmatically de-tag my
addresses, allowing them to intentionally override up my personal and
domain-level mail handling. In place of the transparent "plus hack" I
now have slightly more complexity in server config that buys me and my
users safer tagging while occasionally dropping a wannabe deliverability
wizard into a blackholed moat of his own digging. The feature you want
to see in MM3 would probably make it easier for a clueless MM admin to
do that without bad intent or even thought. There's a certain bofhly
appeal to that, but I try not to let that side hold sway.
------------------------------------------------------
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
