Greetings,
the openoffice.org community has some quite high volume mailing
lists. These lists are hosted in an environment (offered by SUN, I
believe) whose settings no OOo volunteer can change, or add procmail
or anything else. They can (almost) only moderate lists or
not. Currently, to be as helpful and accessible as possible to any
novice user, no matter how little email skills he has, the moderators
are running those lists in this way:
1) regular subscribers can (of course) post directly to the list
2) posts from casual, unsubscribed users who can't or don't want to
subscribe just to ask one question are held for moderator
approval
3) several moderators regularly spend some of their free time to
manually filter all the "unsubscribers" messages. They delete
spam and forward real help requests to the list
4) people can also post to the mailing list address through
gmane.org
When some subscribed user answers on the list the unsubscribed
request...
5) the moderators, or some other volunteer, *manually* forward that
answer, with a "since you're not subscribed, you might not have
seen this suggestion for your problem" or similar header, BOTH
TO THE UNSUBSCRIBED GUY AND TO THE LIST ADDRESS. The "rationale"
is that:
a) the unsubscribed sender might just be waiting for a
personal answer, having not understood that it went to the
list and/or is readable in the online archives
b) regular subscribers, seeing the message again with that
boilerplate on top, know they don't have to inform the
unsubscribed guy again, so the poor soul is not flooded
with many copies of the same suggestion.
The net result is, as you might have imagined by now:
moderators and other volunteers waste a lot of time to forward message
all around the net. OK, it is their time, but...
all those duplicates go to bloat and make redundant the web archives
wasting everybody's bandwidth
constantly spamming regular users through the list (note that with
what they do, if you get one of those dupes in a thread you *want* to
follow, you realize it only after you've opened it, since each
volunteer has his own writing style, it's not the same message-id,
etc..)
I have complained, proposing to automate 5a. Since nothing can be done
on the server side, I have suggested that a list subscriber with a
linux box connected 24/7 sets up his own .procmailrc to do what is
suggested below. What I need in practice are the actual procmail
recipes to do it.
I am asking to some real expert to do it for me because this is not
for me, that is this is not my personal email, this is a service to do
with procmail to all the openoffice community. I only know enough
about procmail to have done stuff for myself. I can experiment and
risk errors when my own stuff is at stake, not when it could mess the
inbox of hundreds of subscribers.
Please don't hesitate to ask for more info, sample messages, whatever.
Thank you in advance, on behalf of all OOo users, for any feedback.
0) considering the number of different ways, clients and skill levels,
we can probably count only on the subject header and what is described
below. Message-id, In-reply-to, etc... might be screwed, missing,
etc..
The recipe (as I summarized it on the ooo list):
1) Unsubscribed user posts to list
2) procmail recognizes that message as coming from unsubscribed user,
(using what explained here:
http://openoffice.peschtra.com/tips/ooott_web_unsubscribed.html)
and memorizes subject and original unsubscribed sender
3) EVERYBODY STOPS THIS CRAP OF REPOSTING EVERYTHING TO EVERYBODY AND
HIS THIRD COUSIN, BECAUSE:
4) if they have nothing to add, they just sit down, no posting
anywhere
5) if they have something to say, ONLY REPLY TO LIST AS IT SHOULD BE,
SINCE:
6) the same procmail at 2) will recognize when THE LIST receives an
answer to "thread-started-by-unsubscribed-guy" and
7) the same procmail will send to $UNSUBSCRIBED-GUY only a
notification that somebody answered, please check the archives to
read it.
8) even better: procmail can automatically forward an extra copy of
that answer:
ONLY TO $UNSUBSCRIBED-GUY
WITH Reply address set to discuss(_at_)openoffice(_dot_)org
ONLY for the first N replies if that makes you feel
better
--
Marco Fioretti mfioretti, at the server mclink.it
Fedora Core 3 for low memory http://www.rule-project.org/
It's not the hours you put in your work that counts, it's the work you
put in the hours. Sam Ewing
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