[4700] in Depressing_Thoughts
Re: whimper
eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (eichin@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Tue Oct 25 18:59:41 1994
majordomo does have support for this. it's "admin" mode if you want to
look for it. The trick is that *all* postings get fed to majordomo,
and anything matching certain keywords or patterns get processed. (If
it happens to actually match a valid subscribe/unsubscribe requests;
anything invalid gets bounced to the poster, anything "almost" valid
gets sent for approval, just like normal requests.)
The filters are tolerable, but not great. There have been problems
with messages that contain "help" in the first two sentences getting
the list help message and not going out without the user rewording
them.
The sad part is that almost all of the messages to the request address
that I handle for the linux lists were written as if they were
addressed to a machine -- maybe one in twenty had *any* politeness in
them. This is half the reason I switched them over to Majordomo...
For a variety of reasons, I don't run the filters (it's a news
gateway, after all) and even better, I don't read the lists themselves
anymore, so any subscription questions *have* to go to the right
place. It helps that I generally refuse to help people get on the list
beyond point at the relevant section of the list -- if they can't
compose the correct request, they'll be a problem later when they try
to unsubscribe...
Clearly we need better user-level mail agents anyway. I read a lot of
work related mail as news, with strn, so I can assign higher scores to
people or subjects I actually care about... and "expire" helps too...
