[Mailman-Users] Mailman vs. Email Aliases

[Jon Forrest]

I'm a new Mailman user. So far things are working OK.

I just discovered a wrinkle that I suspect that other
mailmen and mailwomen have faced.

I follow good Sendmail/Postfix practice by breaking
my email aliases file into two sections - one where
I define a canonical email name for each person, and
the other where I define my email lists (which will
be replaced by Mailman-managed lists). In my lists
I only use the canonical name so that if somebody's
email address changes, I only have to change one thing
and then everything else works.

To show what I mean, I'll have something like this:

smith: ***@gmail.com

list1: smith
list2: smith
list3: smith

So when smith moves to yahoo.com, I only have to
change the first line.

However, I'm deliberately setting up each Mailman list
to only allow posting from members of the list. This means
that the technique above won't work because if I put
the canonical name in as the list member, any mail send
to the list by ***@gmail.com will be rejected. Using
***@gmail.com in all the lists goes against the teachings
of Sendmail/Postfix, which are righteous. I don't currently
see any way around this.

What would be nice would be if there were a way to point Mailman
to the Sendmail/Postfix aliases file and then change the Mailman
check for list membership to do alias expansion.

I checked the FAQ but didn't see any mention of this. What am I
missing?

Cordially,

[Mark Sapiro]

Jon Forrest wrote:

<snip>

Post by Jon Forrest
list1: smith
list2: smith
list3: smith
So when smith moves to yahoo.com, I only have to
change the first line.
However, I'm deliberately setting up each Mailman list
to only allow posting from members of the list. This means
that the technique above won't work because if I put
the canonical name in as the list member, any mail send

You have a more serious issue to contend with first and that is that
Mailman does not accept email addresses consisting of only a
local-part ('smith' in your above example).

Post by Jon Forrest
However, I'm deliberately setting up each Mailman list
to only allow posting from members of the list. This means
that the technique above won't work because if I put
the canonical name in as the list member, any mail send
of Sendmail/Postfix, which are righteous. I don't currently
see any way around this.

Stop thinking in terms of using MTA aliases to manage your list members
and let Mailman do its job.

Smith can subscribe her gmail address to a number of your Mailman lists
and when she moves to yahoo, she can change her address globally on
all your lists to which she is subscribed by visiting her options page
for a single list and changing her address globally.

[Jon Forrest]

Post by Mark Sapiro
You have a more serious issue to contend with first and that is that
Mailman does not accept email addresses consisting of only a
local-part ('smith' in your above example).

I didn't know that. I had read the following:

# The "host_name" is the preferred name for email to mailman-related
# addresses on this host, and generally should be the mail host's
# exchanger address, if any. This setting can be useful for selecting
# among alternative names of a host that has multiple addresses.
host_name = 'ce.berkeley.edu'

so I was expecting this to be used when only a local part appears.

Post by Mark Sapiro
Stop thinking in terms of using MTA aliases to manage your list members
and let Mailman do its job.
Smith can subscribe her gmail address to a number of your Mailman lists
and when she moves to yahoo, she can change her address globally on
all your lists to which she is subscribed by visiting her options page
for a single list and changing her address globally.

Our list members don't use Mailman's web interface. All our lists are
created by administrative staff. Could a list administrator also
change an address globally?

Jon

[Mark Sapiro]

Post by Jon Forrest
# The "host_name" is the preferred name for email to mailman-related
# addresses on this host, and generally should be the mail host's
# exchanger address, if any. This setting can be useful for selecting
# among alternative names of a host that has multiple addresses.
host_name = 'ce.berkeley.edu'
so I was expecting this to be used when only a local part appears.

host_name is used for constructing the list posting address and the
various <listname>-* addresses from the list name.

Post by Jon Forrest
Our list members don't use Mailman's web interface. All our lists are
created by administrative staff. Could a list administrator also
change an address globally?

No. Only the Mailman site admin (anyone who has logged on with the site
password) and the individual user can request a global address change.
In addition, regardless of who requests the change and whether or not
it is global, a confirmation request is sent to the new address and
the change must be confirmed.

Individual list owners (logged in with a list admin password) generally
can't request/change information for other lists.