Mailing list administrivia

Bill Campbell bill at celestial.com
Sun Apr 26 14:55:06 PDT 2015


On Sun, Apr 26, 2015, Jean-Pierre A. Radley via Filepro-list wrote:
>Bill,
>
>Mailman is now substituting whatever is in the From: Header with:
>"John Doe via Filepro-list <filepro-list at lists.celestial.com>".
>
>Could you preserve the exact contents of the incoming From: Header in
>a new X-Orig-From: Header? I could then use a program like procmail to
>restore the the original From: contents before a message hits the
>mailbox.

The original Sender's address is in the 'Reply-To:' header unless the
original message had a Reply-To: in which case it is used unchanged.  If
there wasn't a Reply-To: in the original, there should be in the messages
as sent to the list.

This should be sufficient for any sane mail client to simply reply to the
sender (I'm surprised nobody has gone off on the Reply-To: thelist tangent
-- which will never happen while I'm in charge of the list :-).

I can't say how Outlook handles this as I don't use it.  I wouldn't be
surprised if it does something stupid though.

The changes done then are:

  1.  The From: header is munged to use the list name which then works as
      the IP of the mail server is OK with DMARC for celestial.com.

  2.  The Reply-To: will be unchanged if the original email had one.  I
      think that it will add the Sender address if it was different than
      the sender (I'll put a different Reply-To: in this message so I can
      see what it does).

  3.  A new Reply-To: will be added if there wasn't one in the original
      message.  This one will contain the email in the original From:
      header.

  4.  These were the only changes.  All other headers are unchanged.

Finally, we really don't need a flame war on this.

Bill
-- 
INTERNET:   bill at celestial.com  Bill Campbell; Celestial Software LLC
URL: http://www.celestial.com/  PO Box 820; 6641 E. Mercer Way
Voice:          (206) 236-1676  Mercer Island, WA 98040-0820
Fax:            (206) 232-9186  Skype: jwccsllc (206) 855-5792

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man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.
    -- Winston Churchill


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