In message <199704210314.AA27953@???>, Michelle Dick writes:
> > There just *has* to be a better way to do this ... :-)
>
> Yes, use a mailing list manager. It isn't reasonable to expect any
> MTA to be a full-function mailing list manager.
I agree completely, which is why I'm not doing mailing list management
with Exim. I'm doing mailing list EXPLOSION, which Exim does very
efficiently and elegantly. List management (changing the population
of the input and output sets in accordance with user requests) is done
by a completely separate agency.
> Actually, if your list gets larger you are going to want to
> automatically handle subscribes, unsubscribes, and automatically do
> confirms on subscriptions (subscription forgeries are becomming
> common, there is even software out there that will forge subscribe
> requests to thousands of mailing lists for you). And some spammers
> are now mass subscribing to lists, spamming them, and then
> unsubscribing.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the MTA function, which is steady-
state --- ie. the function does not change as a result of user requests.
That's the dividing line between the MTA and the list management software.
List management modifies the mail transfer function, while the MTA just
implements whatever the function may be at any given time. The MTA is
not aware of any change of function, and most certainly does not play a
role in changing it under instruction from users.
> If you like to tinker with software and make it do exactly what you
> want, I recommend SmartList. But all mailing list managment programs
> I know of have a feature to limit posting to subscribers only (so any
> will do). Most also allow additional lists of addresses approved for
> posting. Also with SmartList, it is trivial to do somthing like:
> permit posting only by subscribers who have been members for at least
> X days/weeks/months/whatever (which trips up the spammers who
> subscribe,spam, and unsubscribe).
Yes, good stuff, but I'm talking about Exim's MTA role, not about list
management. I haven't tried SmartList but I'm sure it would do the
job, as indeed would Majordomo and lots of other systems. I know that
they also provide exploders for plugging into /etc/aliases, but that
is quite a separate part of the list system, a part that is not needed
with Exim because it already has an elegant exploder in the form of the
forwardfile director. It lacks an input set validator at present, but
that would be so simple to implement and so consistent with Exim's very
nice set-oriented validation system that it deserves a bit of thought
put into it to turn it into possibly the nicest implementation of the
in/out-set concept I've ever seen.
Rich.
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