Re: preventing majordomo commands from bouncing back

In the message "Re: [Micronet] preventing majordomo commands from
bouncing ", dated 2005-05-11, Bob Callaway wrote:

>When I first encountered the problem that Sean reported, I could not
>believe that a system would be designed this way.

   It's worse: majordomo - at least the older 1.x version we're
running on lists.berkeley.edu, to be replaced soon with GNU Mailman -
uses some rather broadly construed regular expressions to try to
'catch' errant list subscription requests and other list server
commands before these are broadcast to the list. As a result,
sometimes even the use of some similar, non-command words in messages
can cause those messages to bounce to the list owner ...

>However, I haven't noticed these sorts of bounces for awhile, even
>though several words I use often in messages are also Majordomo
>command words. I wonder why.

   This depends on list configuration; some lists are configured so
that Majordomo's 'administrivia' filter is turned off. In addition,
the 'verboten' words need to be present within the first nn lines of
a message to be caught, where nn is "usually around 10 lines,
depending on the phase of the moon and other scattered,
non-deterministic conditions." (Well, that's probably not strictly
accurate, but as a list admin, it feels like that at times.)

>Does this issue crop up with Mailman, the list manager that we'll be
>using shortly?

   GNU Mailman also offers an administrivia filter, configurable on a
per-list basis. I don't know how it compares with the old
Majordomo's equivalent feature, but I'd suspect it can't be nearly as
brain-dead.

   Since Mailman offers list subscribers a rich Web-based interface
for subscribing, unsubscribing, and managing their subscription
options, it seems likely that most users will choose that interface,
rather than sending email commands to perform these tasks.
Therefore, there probably will be relatively few errant
administrative requests sent to lists, and the need to enable this
filter should be considerably lessened.

Aron Roberts
Workstation Software Support Group

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Received on Wed May 11 18:23:01 2005