From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Jason Molenda To: Bob Manson Cc: overseers@sourceware.cygnus.com Subject: Re: important people (!) unable to use sourceware Date: Thu, 09 Mar 2000 23:32:00 -0000 Message-ID: <20000309233226.A26572@shell17.ba.best.com> References: <200003100325.TAA17403@tristam.juniper.net> X-SW-Source: 2000-q1/msg00008.html Message-ID: <20000309233200.wZyMRYfkvm0Ys4tE3LxxKW67guyMSGCBwff0DtbjY0U@z> On Thu, Mar 09, 2000 at 07:25:47PM -0800, Bob Manson wrote: > Jason and I have discussed the "only allow subscribers to post" policy > in the past. IMO it's the best overall solution, but I guess new > lusers can't forge mail when they need to or something. If the > mailing list software allowed the subscriber to specify multiple > allowed from addresses, there wouldn't be any excuse for not doing > this... Actually, ezmlm supports this pretty well. It has both a subscriber and an "allow" list. I would subscribe "jason@domain.org" to libc-hacker by sending a mail note to libc-hacker-subscribe-jason=domain.org@sourceware.cygnus.com I would specify an alternate e-mail address which should be accepted, "jason@foo.org" by sending a mail note to libc-hacker-allow-subscribe-jason=foo.org@sourceware.cygnus.com The libc-hacker list is a closed subscription list, so both of thes need to be approved by the moderator (Uli) before they take effect. The biggest problem with ezmlm's only-subscribers-may-post is that it bases its check on the SMTP envelope From_ address, not the "From:" header in the mail note. Most people don't realize that these address may be different. For instance, Mark Galassi sends mail as "rosalia@lanl.gov", but his SMTP envelope From_ address when sending mail from inside LANL is actually "rosalia@nis.lanl.gov". He would have to know to add that address to the 'allow' list. Worst case, if they're at an organization where all their client systems stick the client hostname in the envelope addr, this kind of posting policy would be nearly useless. You don't see that kind of lameo configuration much these days, though. For a smaller group of subscribers (like cygwin-developers or libc-hacker) where the participants are generally savvy, only-subscribers-may-post can work OK. But if you've got a large number of people, or a number of clueless users, this arrangement will cause many headaches for the list maintainer. Jason