On Mon, 2006-03-13 at 13:20 -0700, Craig White wrote:
> this happens to be just one of the very many lists on redhat.com and I
> don't see the list admins asking for suggestions on how to handle this.
Neither do I, but there has been the contention that nothing could be
done. David and I beg to differ. We think putting posters' email
addresses into post headers is a mis-feature that turns out to be a
weakness.
> So without offering to write the program necessary for redhat as a
> supplement to their list management software, making suggestions about
> what 'they' should do is strictly engaging in a self-indulgent
> activity.
Sticking ones head in the sand is a kind of self-indulgence, too.
What we are proposing is avoiding to put list members' real email
addresses into the "From:" headers of list email. Obviously those real
addresses are essential for submitting and receiving posts, hence
submitting or subscribing under a fake address isn't an option.
As for "a program" to do this: seeing that list email is sent by an
outbound MTA running postfix, how about this in sender_canonical.regexp:
# Don't munge the list address:
/^(.*)@(redhat\.com)/ ${1}@${2}
# Munge everything else:
/^(.*)@(.*)/ ${1}@${2}.invalid
Season to taste.
The first line doesn't take into account that RH staff can be list
subscribers as well, they would just miss out on that feature. This
assumes that the outbound MTA is used for list email as well as non-list
email. If it's only used for list email the problem doesn't exist.
The kind of munging proposed above would also cater for private replies
with very little additional effort for those who insist on it.
> Unless of course, you create a bugzilla entry in the mailman package as
> an RFE ;-) My thinking is that unless you are running lists yourself
> and experiencing this problem, it's not too likely to get much traction.
If people agree that putting list members' real email addresses into
posts is a mis-feature, it just might.
Cheers
Steffen.
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
