procmail
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Re: Reviving procmail and SmartList

1998-10-10 21:49:59
    The right way to do what you suggest would be to allow commands like

   subscribe <list> <address>

and use cryptographic cookies for authentication (again, "subscribe"
here is only an example, it could be replaced by any MLM command).
Automatically aliasing addresses that are not the same is IMHO a Bad
Thing [TM], no matter what noble purposes you have in mind when you do
it.

Almost all mailing list software has this as a configurable option.  For
example, majordomo does it via the 'mungedomain' flag.

It's especially useful when you restrict posting only to list members.
If someone's address is sometimes user(_at_)email(_dot_)domain(_dot_)com and 
other times
user(_at_)smtp(_dot_)domain(_dot_)com (which I've seen), they obviously don't 
want to
subscribe twice to send messages to the list.

I've been the listowner of certain horticultural mailing lists for a while
now too, and most of the unsubscription problems that I've seen are
because the user's address has changed without them knowing.  Usually they
subscribed when the ISP was masquerading as one domain/host, then the ISP's
configuration changed and the masquerading was completely different.  Not
everyone is a power email user (especially on my horticultural lists),
so it's nice to have this automated.  The ideal would be to have this as a
per list (or per user) setting.

Chris

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