The mailing list for listmasters using Sympa

[Steve Shipway <address@concealed>]

One problem I have with MailMerge lists is that you never really know if your mailmerge will work as intended before you send it out.  Sometimes, it results in a blank email being sent to the list, which is just wrong.

 

So, I’m proposing a new scenario outcome, ‘test_it’.  This is like ‘do_it’, but instead of distributing to the list, it just sends back to the original sender (after mailmerge and so on).  Therefore, you can create a send scenario that checks for a specific keyword in the subject line or a specific header on the message, and has a ‘test_it’ outcome.  You can then test the mailmerge (or anything else) by posting the message to the list with this condition met, and you will be sent back an email showing what the merged message would look like.

 

The attached patch does this, and is against 6.1.23.

 

The patch works by triggering the undocumented X-Sympa-Receipient header (spelling error intentional) which is an undocumented feature of Sympa with the testing functionality.

 

Here’s an example scenario for a mailmerge list that uses this feature.  This scenario also blocks the use of SMIME signatures as they are incompatible with mailmerge:

 

true()                                smime         -> reject(reason='send_nosmime')

! is_editor([listname],[sender])      smtp,dkim,md5 -> reject(reason='send_editor')

match([header->Subject],/SYMPA-TEST/) smtp,dkim,md5 -> test_it

match([header->X-Sympa-Test],/[Yy]/)      smtp,dkim,md5 -> test_it

true()                                smtp,dkim,md5 -> do_it

 

I’ve logged this on the bugtracker as a feature request, along with the patch.

 

Feedback and comments welcome (I’m posting a lot to the list today…)

 

Steve

 

 

Steve Shipway

University of Auckland

UNIX Systems Design Team Lead

address@concealed

+64 (9) 3737 599 ext 86487

 

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