Mailman Annoyances

Details specific to the Mailman available for those using Dreamhost ISP. As of this writing (20220315), it is version 2.1.23.

Topics

You can set Mailman to allow use of Topics.

Setting up topics:

  1. Go to Configuration Category “Topics”
    1. Enable
    2. Specify number of body lines to scan for the topic, 5 is default. If 0, then only Subject is scanned.
    3. Topic Name. Meaningful name for the admin
    4. Regexp. A word, or regex to match. E.g., one (matches messages with the word “one”), [two] (matches messages with “[two]”, “three|four” (matches messages with either a “three” or a “four”)
    5. Description. Write a book if you want to describe this topic.
    6. Add new item… and …after this one: click to add new topic, could be after (or before) this one.

Using Topics.

Each user can change this in their membership settings. The Admin can also set these for any user (membership management, click on user email). Scroll down and set:

Examples. Assume a topic is configured as “ONE”. This means for examples, that a message with the subject “This is one message” will be considered in that topic and a message with subject “This is message two” will not be in the ONE topic.

user has defaults (no topics, and No for unmatching messages)user gets all messages sent to the list
user selects topic “ONE” and says Yes for unmatching messagesuser gets all messages sent to the list
user selects topic “ONE” and says No for unmatching messagesuser will only get messages in topic ONE