On 7/4/19 6:00 AM, Andrew Bernard wrote:

I received a very simple post today that was held with the following reason:

The message is being held because:

Message contains administrivia

At your convenience, visit your dashboard to approve or deny the request.

What is this all about? What does Mailman consider to be administrivia, of all things, and why is this a reason to hold a message?

The administrivia check is designed to detect messages posted to a list which look like they should have been sent to the list-request address instead. You can turn this check off in Postorius at Settings -> Message Acceptance -> Administrivia.

The only thing in the message I can see is that it mentioned '100 members'. Is Mailman becoming sentient and developing an attitude? Seriously, I'd like to know more about this.

That's not the reason. The administrivia rule checks the Subject: header and the first N non-blank lines of the first text/plain part of the message for things that look like an email command. I.e., lines that begin with a command word followed by the appropriate number of 'arguments'. Here's the list

EMAIL_COMMANDS = { # keyword: (minimum #args, maximum #args) 'confirm': (1, 1), 'help': (0, 0), 'info': (0, 0), 'lists': (0, 0), 'options': (0, 0), 'password': (2, 2), 'remove': (0, 0), 'set': (3, 3), 'subscribe': (0, 3), 'unsubscribe': (0, 1), 'who': (0, 2), }

This is actuall not a valid list because it is from Mailman 2.1 and not all the above are valid Mailman 3 email commands, but that's what is checked. The N is the configured value for

[mailman] email_commands_max_lines:

(default 10)

Thus, if the Subject: or one of the first 10 non-blank lines is

who are you?

the administrivia rule will hit. See the source in mailman/rules/administrivia.py for more detail.

-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan