[Dovecot] Duplicate suppression
Hi there,
Does the Dovecot project have plans to implement duplicate suppression at some stage?
I have a situation where several people belong to more than one mailing list. One alias ('staff') incorporates several lists. These staff are receiving duplicate messages (one copy for every list they're on) when a message is sent to this staff alias. There is no reason they need to receive more than one copy.
There seems to be no way I can turn that feature off in my MTA so I thought I'd try a bit further down the chain.
thanks, Greg
Greg Trounson wrote:
Hi there,
Does the Dovecot project have plans to implement duplicate suppression at some stage?
I have a situation where several people belong to more than one mailing list. One alias ('staff') incorporates several lists. These staff are receiving duplicate messages (one copy for every list they're on) when a message is sent to this staff alias. There is no reason they need to receive more than one copy.
Your wording here is a little confusing. Are you saying that several people are not only on the mailing list, but also in the 'staff' alias, which is also on the mailing list?
There seems to be no way I can turn that feature off in my MTA so I thought I'd try a bit further down the chain.
Sounds to me like your MTA is doing what you've told it: when mail comes in for X, send a copy to [A,B,C,D....].
One option you might consider (and one I'll be investigating once we migrate to 1.0) is to have the list mails delivered to shared folders. Then your only issues are new/read flags (which can be great for sales inquiry lists, btw) and who gets to delete messages.
-- Curtis Maloney cmaloney@cardgate.net
Curtis Maloney wrote:
Greg Trounson wrote:
Hi there,
Does the Dovecot project have plans to implement duplicate suppression at some stage?
I have a situation where several people belong to more than one mailing list. One alias ('staff') incorporates several lists. These staff are receiving duplicate messages (one copy for every list they're on) when a message is sent to this staff alias. There is no reason they need to receive more than one copy.
Your wording here is a little confusing. Are you saying that several people are not only on the mailing list, but also in the 'staff' alias, which is also on the mailing list?
Ugh, you're right. I could have made that clearer.
What I mean is that I have a mailing list 'staff', which contains several sub-lists (general, academics, visitors, etc). Now there are a few people who are members of the general list and academics, and others who are members of visitors and academics. So when an email is sent to 'staff', the people receive the message once for every sub-list they appear in. This is all done with postfix aliases.
A diagram might help. In the below case, both Jan and Chris will receive two copies of every message addressed to 'staff':
staff
|
+------+------+
/ | \
/ | \general visitors academics | | | | | | bob chris chris luke gary jack jan mark jill jan
thanks, Greg
On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Greg Trounson wrote:
Hello,
if you maintain the lists "in" your MTA, I'm actually surprised; if the lists are handled externally, e.g. mailman, listsrv, the MTA has no way to check for duplicate recipients, because the mail is leaving the MTA to the list server and the comes back, but is new message now.
Otherwise it is a job for your MDA, because the mail is probably spooled into different folders as well. -> BTW: In environments, when hard linking is working well -- e.g. pure IMAP/POP access -- it would be a nice way to handle mass mails; the MDA knows that such mails was delivered already and spools it only once, hardlinking them all. And if the link would be created into the same folder -> just omit it.
I have the problem that I do recieve mails twice from external mailing lists, because some MTA in the middle stores them and forwards them twice. Therefore I run a script that deletes those duplicates, however: you should not rely on the message ID only, because it MUST be unique for one MUA for one user during its lifetime (up to the next installation) only, hence, there are (were?) MUAs that simple count the message they send.
Bye,
-- Steffen Kaiser
Greg Trounson wrote:
I have a situation where several people belong to more than one mailing list. One alias ('staff') incorporates several lists. These staff are receiving duplicate messages (one copy for every list they're on) when a message is sent to this staff alias. There is no reason they need to receive more than one copy.
I would say this feature would be better suited to your Mailing List software
Michael
On Tue, 17 Jan 2006, Greg Trounson wrote:
Does the Dovecot project have plans to implement duplicate suppression at some stage?
I have a situation where several people belong to more than one mailing list. One alias ('staff') incorporates several lists. These staff are receiving duplicate messages (one copy for every list they're on) when a message is sent to this staff alias. There is no reason they need to receive more than one copy.
There seems to be no way I can turn that feature off in my MTA so I thought I'd try a bit further down the chain.
We use the program "formail" from our MDA to remove duplicate messages with the same message id.
Peter
Greg Trounson gregt@maths.otago.ac.nz wrote Tue, 17 Jan 2006 16:26:46 +1300:
| Does the Dovecot project have plans to implement duplicate suppression | at some stage?
I'm pretty sure that dovecot-lda suppresses duplicate messages, at least as long as CMU's sieve implementation is used.
-- Linus
participants (6)
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Curtis Maloney
-
Greg Trounson
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Linus Nordberg
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Michael Tibben
-
Peter Svensson
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Steffen Kaiser