Fwd: [Floss-seminar] navigating Mailman using multiple addresses

[Justin W. Flory]

Forwarding this to this list as well, to help make it visible on a
public archive.


-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [Floss-seminar] navigating Mailman using multiple addresses
Date: Thu, 09 Feb 2017 15:43:19 +0000
From: D. Joe <deejoe(a)mail.rit.edu&gt;
To: floss-seminar(a)lists.rit.edu


This is a FAQ that probably affects most who attempt to use RIT's GNU
Mailman instance to run a true discussion (as opposed to just a
distribution) mailing list. If anyone knows of this being documented
somewhere else, please offer pointers. In the meantime:

It seems quite common for people to use a Google account with their RIT
email address. In this example, I'll use as the local part of most of these
addresses an example DCE* called "dce5678".

So, the canonical RIT email address as best I can tell, what shows up in SIS
and such, is
 dce5678(a)rit.edu

the corresponding Gmail address for that would then be

 dce5678(a)g.rit.edu

Some of us have also taken advantage of the ability to set a customized
local part of an address, by using the mail.rit.edu subdomain. So, if dce
stood for the longer name Dolph C. Egfal, then if Dolph might have gone in
and set up the alias dolph(a)mail.rit.edu to forward to dce5678(a)rit.edu.

This is where things get fuzzy for me, since I do not use the RIT-associated
Gmail system (in part because of the mess it makes of things like this, but
also for reasons well beyond the scope of this discussion).

The problem I've seen is that people will enter one of the above addresses
into Mailman to subscribe themselves, but Mailman, as an anti-spam measure,
can be configured only to accept mail from a subscribed address. You might
see where this is going: With people using any of 3 different addresses,
some skew happens, and Mailman rejects email.

For instance, if Dolph suscribes as

  dce5678(a)rit.edu

but then sends email via Gmail, what shows up as their From: address might
be

  dce5678(a)g.rit.edu

So, this Gmail address would need to be subscribed too/instead.

Further, if Dolph has the mail.rit.edu alias configured, they might instead
need to subscribe using

 dolph(a)mail.rit.edu

One thing that makes this a bit hard to track is that we are changing out
both the local part (dce5678 vs dolph) as we are changing out the domain
part (rit.edu vs g.rit.edu vs mail.rit.edu). This makes it difficult to keep
straight, because sometimes we are changing both (dce5678@rit ->
dolph(a)mail.rit.edu) and sometimes we are changing out just one
(dce5678(a)rit.edu -> dce5678(a)g.rit.edu).

If you run into trouble with this, please include as detailed a problem
report as you can, including either full text of any error messages, email
headers, etc. If you don't know how to view email headers in your mail
client, please look up how to do that, or let us know what email client you
are using and we can try to help you. Also, screenshots of settings and
error messages can be very helpful (though please take some care not to send
screenshots containing confidential information, eg, cleartext passwords).

Feel free to send me such reports and requests off-list.

Hope that helps,

-- 
Joe

* Incidentally, I've found the term "dce" seems rapidly to be losing its
  currency. It refers, presumably, to its origins in these kinds of systems
  at one point:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributed_Computing_Environment

  But start.rit.edu is today showing me a Capitalized Term that presumably
  meant to confer some sort of Phrasal Official Status:
  RIT Computer Account

_______________________________________________
Floss-seminar mailing list
Floss-seminar(a)lists.rit.edu
https://lists.rit.edu/mailman/listinfo.mmcgi/floss-seminar