The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Niklas Matthies <address@concealed>]

Hi,

We had the following situation on a newsletter mailing list:

The list owner, who is the one who normally sends messages to that
list, bounced an existing mail message to the list for distribution.
The message was rejected by Sympa, because the From header was still
set to the original author of the message (as expected when bouncing
mails), and the list owner who bounced the message only appeared in
the Sender header.

Also, the rejection notice was only sent to the original author in
the From, and not to the list owner, so he wasn't informed that the
message he bounced to the list wasn't distributed.

RFC 2822 has the following to say about the Sender field:

    The "Sender:" field specifies the mailbox of the agent responsible
    for the actual transmission of the message. For example, if a
    secretary were to send a message for another person, the mailbox
    of the secretary would appear in the "Sender:" field and the
    mailbox of the actual author would appear in the "From:" field.

Given this, shouldn't Sympa also consider the value of the Sender
field, if present, when checking privileges, and possibly send
rejection notices to the Sender rather than (or in addition) to
the From addresses?

I realize that the latter may cause problems when the Sender is itself
a mailing list. Still, if the author of a message differs from the
sender, shouldn't the sender (the one "responsible for the actual
transmission of the message") be more relevant to Sympa than the
author?

Of course, this all depends on the interpretation of the words
"author" and "sender". But considering the RFC's example of a
secretary, it seems reasonable to me that the secretary needs to be
approved to send messages to the list, even if in behalf of the other
person, and that if the message is rejected, that the secretary will
be informed rather than (only) the other person.

So, is there a way to make such bounced messages work with Sympa?
Are there problems with using the Sender field this way that I'm
missing?

We're still using Sympa 6.0 Beta 2 by the way, in case that matters.

-- Niklas Matthies