Currently all mail to the Mailman system maintainence list is sitting in the held queue. This list gets the messages from the Mailman system that require human intervention, such as copying the contents for a new list into the /etc/mail/aliases file. At present (6/24/2004) there are over 400 messages in the mailman held message queue. I bet a lot of them are Spam.

We need to form a cabal of Mailmen to handle this point where the computer hits humans. They need to know the acceptable list creation policy and say yeah or nay and then edit /etc/mail/aliases as appropriate. They will need to know the Mailman maintainence password to do this.

One thing that needs to be manually done is to make sure the list name doesn't collide with the username space. We also need a way of authenticating the list creation creator. I think requiring them to use their @employees.org account as the list-owner address would work.

Currently no one owns this project.

Comments?

comments:

Need automation --key, Mon, 26 Jul 2004 12:07:17 -0700 reply
We really need automation to handle this and a table in the admin database to tie the sponsoring account to the mailing list. Several of the current list owners are accounts outside of the sponsor mailing addresses and outside the virtual hosts.

Create a user account for each mailing list. --key, Mon, 26 Jul 2004 12:08:15 -0700 reply
Rob had a great idea to create a user account for each mailing list. This gives a place to hang spam filtering rules, .procmailrc, etc. Capturing his idea here.

Mailman list creation supports postfix aliases. --key, Tue, 27 Jul 2004 14:08:34 -0700 reply
Mailman has direct support for adding it's aliases entries into the Postfix aliases file and kicking the postmap aliases to rebuild the database. What remains is to create our own front end to do the authentication of a user requesting a list and kicking off the list creation. This will be an outgrowth of the usercreation system. "When the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail..."