A(nother) change to mailing lists

Executive summary: Undoing rewriting the “From:” on mailing lists run by CELS Systems to prevent data exposure. I’ll keep it short so you can get the important bits.
Hello, my fellow CELS denizens. How are you? Good? I hope so. I’m fairly nifty, thanks for asking.
But that’s not why I’m writing to you today.
Let’s set the wayback machine to October 18, 2018. That’s when I said this: https://mcssys.wordpress.com/2018/10/24/upcoming-mailman-mailing-list-changes/
Well, tonight, I’m (generally) undoing it. An unforeseen consequence of this change meant that Mac Outlook users were being cursed with a “helpful” feature that resulted in the storage of mailing list addresses associated with the name of who sent it. This has resulted in a lot of unexpected mail broadcasts of things that *should not* be broadcast. It hasn’t been catastrophic yet, but I worry the day is coming.
I’ve set most of the mailing lists back to how they were handling the “from” header before. We had some ideas on a hack that could fix this going forward, but it hasn’t worked out, so it’s time to roll this back before something gets exposed that really shouldn’t.
If you run a mailing list, take a look at the setting “from_is_list” on the general settings of your mailing list’s main page. At this point, our recommendation is that if you expect people to send mail to the list with a from address that does not end in anl.gov, and you expect others outside Argonne to read it, you can set that to “Munge From”. But otherwise, leave it at “Accept”.
I’ve made exceptions for some lists I *know* meet the “Munge Headers” criteria (-discuss lists, for example), but take a look at your lists and use the following rule:
* “Accept”: Readers tend to be from Argonne *or* senders are always from Argonne.
* “Munge Headers”: Readers can be from anywhere *and* senders can be from anywhere. * “Wrap Message”: Ugh, nobody wants that, trust me.
Once we have a more elegant solution, we’ll make an announcement. I’m hopeful we can get that hack to work and get the best of both worlds.
If you’re a Mac Outlook user, you would be well served to clear your local cache of addresses that have been “helpfully” stored. See https://mcssys.wordpress.com/2019/02/27/craigs-helpful-tips-volume-i-wifi-and-outlook/ (second item) for instructions. Our helpful IT folks in CELS Systems can also help with this, just drop us a note to [email protected] and we’ll get you taken care of.
(Also, if you’re not already reading the “[email protected]” mailing list, either subscribe or check out https://mcssys.wordpress.com for other mails and announcements that might not be important enough to disturb everyone. We’ve got a Slack tips and tricks session coming up on Wednesday, you can read about at https://mcssys.wordpress.com/2019/11/14/semimonthly-biweekly-tips-and-tricks-brownbag-wed-nov-27-1130am-using-slack/.)
Thanks, everyone. Happy Thursday before turkey day.