[ale] Reply-To controversy: a solution

[Joseph Knapka]

Hi folks,

I hereby propose a workable solution to the Reply-To
controversy, along with a recipe for achieving it. I've tested the
configuration described below on a new install of Mailman 2.1.1,
and it works.

The solution involves creating a new mailing list,
"ale-no-reply-to at ale.org".  Subscribers who don't want to see
"Reply-To: ale at ale.org" will have to unsubscribe from ale at ale.org and
subscribe to ale-no-reply-to at ale.org instead.  Once that's done, and
provided the lists are configured properly as described below,
subscribers to ale-no-reply-to will see exactly the same traffic as
subscribers to ale. Subscribers to the new list will be able to post
to ale at ale.org, as usual; in fact, for all practical purposes it will
appear that they *are* subscribed to ale at ale.org. In particular, they
will be able to reply to posters (and not to the list) using their
client's "Reply" function, and to the poster and ale at ale.org using
"Reply All".

NOTE NOTE NOTE: subscribers should *not* *ever* post directly to
ale-no-reply-to at ale.org; they should post to ale at ale.org as usual.  Of
course, any sort of "Reply" that goes to the list will go to
ale at ale.org, as expected.


For the list admins, here's the recipe:

(1) Create a new Mailman list, ale-no-reply-to at ale.org

(2) Configure ale-no-reply-to as follows (options named as per
the Mailman WWW interface):

  . General Options/first_strip_reply_to = Yes
  . General Options/reply_goes_to_list = Poster
  . Non-Digest Options/msg_footer = [Nothing, nada, empty set, make it blank]
  . Digest Options/digest_footer = [Nothing, nada, empty set, make it blank]
  . Privacy Options/Sender Filters/generic_nonmember_option = Accept
  . Privacy Options/Recipient Filters/acceptable_aliases = ale

All other options may be left at their default values, or changed
as needed (though I'm not certain changing some other options won't
mess up this cunning plan; YMMV, etc).

(3) Change the configuration of ale at ale.org to accept posts from
nonsubscribers:

  . Privacy Options/Sender Filters/generic_nonmember_option = Accept

(4) Subscribe ale-no-reply-to at ale.org to ale at ale.org. As far as I can
tell, the only practical way to subscribe a list to another list is to
use the command-line script add_members:

$mailman_home/bin/add_members -r - -w n ale <RETURN>
ale-no-reply-to at ale.org <RETURN>
^D


That's it. All that remains is for subscribers to resubscribe to
the no-reply-to list, if that's what they want to do.

The unfortunate thing is that the lists *must* accept posts from
non-members in order for this scheme to work. Changing that would
require surgery to the Mailman source, and if anyone wanted to do that
surgery, they'd probably want to implement Reply-To munging as a
genuine per-user option, instead of making this ugly two-list hack
work "better". I'm going to suggest that to the Mailman development
team for the next release.

Now, I wouldn't want to suggest that any kind of
potentially-flame-war-inducing automated vote be taken on adopting
this proposal :-)  So instead I'll just ask, what do y'all think?

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka
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