Hi.
Majordomo is getting very old -- it was largely abandoned 10 years ago
when almost everyone switched to mailman and so it's essentially dead
and getting rather out of date. I ran a number of legacy mailing
lists on majordomo up until a few years ago, but switched to a custom
PHP code to do all the work. I had patched majordomo a number of
times to deal with 21st century email before abandoning it. With PHP,
the mailing lists could be easier tied into databases and workflows
and also be more easily hosted on small, inexpensive web hosts.
You definitely don't want to bounce the entire message back to the
sender -- then you just become a relay for spammers -- they don't seem
to care if the top bit of the message says the email was bounced.
Bounce messages should only indicate that their email send to the list
failed. Are you sure majordomo doesn't do this when you set
restrict_post to the same file you're using for the mailing list?
Main issues with mailing lists:
1) you need to ensure someone's "on holiday" autoreply won't trigger
an endless loop of autoreplies to the autoreply being sent to the
mailing-list. Majordomo's quite bad at this, largely due to it's age,
but you can patch it up with a regex or two ("out of office|out of the
office|Auto Response|on holiday|i am away"). Ditto for non-standard
undeliverable mail (e.g. subject contains "bounce" or "undeliverable
mail" or "X-Failed-Recipients" in the header) wrongly sent to list
(instead of the envelope sender which is set to an email address that
is monitored for bounced mail). There's a few headers you need to
look for as well as newer autoreplies use the same subject as the
original message (e.g. "X-Machine-Generated").
2) About 10% of people have more than one email address they'll want
to post from. You'll invariably have to add the ability for users to
have more than one email address so that when access to the list is
restricted to members, they can post from more than one location (but
generally only get email at one address -- possibly configurable).
3) Access to lists needs to be restricted to list members or to
privileged members, otherwise spam and evil stuff will wind up on the
list.
4) You have to manage bounced mail (and suspend sending to addresses
where email bounces "too often"). Depending on the list's purpose,
someone may need to monitor the bouncing addresses so that the people
can be contacted and email addresses updated.
5) If you have multiple lists, you really need to have a solution that
(tries to) prevent email sent to multiple lists from being sent twice
to people on both lists.
6) You generally need to support announcement type lists (where you
don't munch the reply-to header) and group lists, where the reply-to
header is set to the list.
7) On many lists you want a footer explaining where to unsubscribe,
etc. Majordomo can't actually do this in a workable manner with MIME
email (it assumes all email is plain text).
Now i wish i could point you to some nice open source PHP code for
doing all this. It seems most of the PHP mailing list projects have
much larger ambitions when what one really wants most of the time is
just a modern PHP replacement for majordomo :-) It's the zero
administration and tight integration with existing website membership
and facilities that i'm always seeking when incorporating mailing lists.
It's probably about 100 lines of PHP code starting with PHPMailer and
PHPMailer-BMH to replace the most useful bits of majordomo (no one
uses email based commands any longer for list management, so you'd
already have those moved to PHP :-). On the other hand, if you
already have majordomo installed it'll take slightly less time to
configure it properly although you may eventually have to spend more
time patching it to fix problems...
Sorry, lots of waffle but no solution...
-Craig
On 10/06/2009, at 8:24 PM, Jochen Daum wrote:
> just trying to decide of how to run a mailing list with closed
> membership. Basically we want to allow only members of a database to
> send emails to the mailinglist, which is then distributed to all other
> members.
>
> The options are to use a php script and pipe the email into it or
> use majordomo.
>
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