What you want is a pattern that matches anything, e.g., .* to match zero or more

occurrences of any character.

Please confirm that setting up a rule for cc's in Header Filter to "hold for moderation," it should block the member from sending a cc?

And, for the pattern, are you suggesting I use ".*" with cc: as the regexprs? Or, what exactly do I use under as a regular expression? Cathryn

Awesome, thanks Mark.

On 6/23/25 13:07, Cathryn McGuire wrote:

cc.* (no space between cc and .*?).

No.

cc goes in the header box and only .* goes in the pattern box.

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

Sorry about the delay in getting back. Truth be known, I was a little burnt out from the merging of MM2 to MM3 and thought I might deal with it all later. Well, now is later.

The .* pattern did not do the job of blocking cc's and bcc's in the Header Filters of Affinity. It lets them go through, even as hold for moderation has been chosen.

I've asked EMWD to advise me because I think Affinity is very new, even though Brian Carpenter was developing it in 2020, is that correct?

If you have any more thoughts about this issue, I'd appreciate it.

Cheers, Cathryn

Hi Mark,

1. Since this post in July, I've been trying to work with EMWD to get the cc's blocked. I've tried every rule configuration in the Header Filter to no avail. EMWD can't seem to help. The setting options are as follows:

Acceptable aliases

This is a list, one per line, of addresses and regexps matching addresses that are acceptable in To: or Cc: in lieu of the list posting address when 'require_explicit_destination' is enabled. Entries are either email addresses or regexps matching email addresses.Regexps are entries beginning with '^ and are matched against every recipient address in the message. The matching is performed with Python's re.match () function, meaning they are anchored to the start of the string.

2. Require Explicit Destination (this is a checked box. Could it be interfering with the Header filters?)

This checks to ensure that the list posting address or an acceptable alias explicitly appears in a To: or Cc: header in the post.

3. Default action to take when a member posts to the list

Accept immediately (bypass other rules) Default action to take when a member posts to the list. Hold: This holds the message for approval by the list moderators. Reject: this automatically rejects the message by sending a bounce notice to the post's author. The text of the bounce notice can be configured by you. Discard: this simply discards the message, with no notice sent to the post's author. Accept: accepts any postings without any further checks. Default Processing: run additional checks and accept the message. NOTE - when set here, all members are blocked.

4. We also have the problem of large image file sizes being let through no matter what setting we have. We have it set to 500KB, but everything is accepted.

Maximum message size 500 The maximum allowed message size in KB. This can be used to prevent emails with large attachments. A size of 0 disables the check.

Perhaps some settings are over-riding others?

What do you think?

Best, Cathryn

Hi Mark,

You: What is the content of this? Probably should be empty. Me: It is empty.

You: No, it doesn't interfere with header checks. Me: Okay.

You: What does Blocked mean? If you mean held for moderation, what is the reason they are held?

Me: We've changed from Accept Immediately to Default Processing. We'll investigate other settings that might be making all message Held.

You: If you have Default action to take when a member posts to the list set to Accept, that bypasses this check and many others. Me: As above--changed from Accept to Default Processing. File sizes should be limited now.

You: What do you have in your header filter rules?

More importantly, what are you trying to accomplish? I.e. what do you want to happen in the following cases?

Message To: the list, no Cc: -- Accepted

Message To: the list, Cc: to other address (non-member) -- Hold for moderation. 
Message To: the list, Cc: to a member's address –– Accepted

Message To: somewhere else, Cc: to the list -- Hold for moderation.

Message To: elsewhere, Bcc: to the list (require explicit destination
will hold this one) -- Hold for moderation.

We're no longer concerned about Bcc because you explained it before. It's in the subject line here, but we're not concerned about it.

Thanks Mark, Cathryn

Mark Sapiro writes:

On 10/20/25 17:50, Cathryn McGuire wrote:

...

More importantly, what are you trying to accomplish? I.e. what do you want to happen in the following cases?

 Message To: the list, no Cc: -- Accepted
 Message To: the list, Cc: to other address (non-member) -- Hold for moderation.
 Message To: the list, Cc: to a member's address ?? Accepted

I don't think you can accomplish this one.

I agree with Mark -- I don't see how to do this without changes to the code. Also, note that even if you could configure this as you desire, the CC addresses will be delivered. But people who subscribe but aren't CC'd will receive the post only if and when the post is released from hold. Only you can decide whether that's desirable, but it's likely some subscribers will be unhappy about it.

If preventing subscribers from getting duplicates is a reason for these settings, there is a user option (I think it's "Not Me Too") that suppresses list distribution to subscribers whose addresses are in To or CC. The list owner can set this manually, one by one. The site owner (who can log in on the host) can use a simple script to do so. When this is set, only the direct message (without list decorations in Subject or footer) is received by CC'd subscribers. This probably won't affect MUAs that organize posts into threads (conversations), but may look odd to subscribers if your lists are configured to add tags or serial numbers to the Subject.

If the point is to discourage resending list posts to third parties, about all you can do is use the anonymous list option to clean all addresses except the list's out of the header. "Full personalization" will substitute the subscriber's address for the list address, but I don't think it has any effect on third party addressees.

Steve

-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan

Cathryn McGuire writes:

1. Since this post in July, I've been trying to work with EMWD to get the cc's blocked.

It is unclear to me what you mean. If you want to prevent non-list addresses from appearing in the header of list posts as distributed, you can configure the list as anonymous (in which case it will appear to be From the list), or you could do something more complicated to remove those headers. See Mark's questions about "what do you want to happen when ..." in his parallel post. Note that BCCs never are seen by your host's mail server or by Mailman -- that is what the "blind" in "blind carbon copy" means.

If you want to prevent recipients of list posts from sending additional copies directly to personal addresses visible in the mail header, you're out of luck. You cannot block CCs or BCCs. They go directly from the person composing the message to the addressees. You could create a configuration where the list refuses to distribute messages with explicit addressees who are not the List Post or an Acceptable Alias, but those addressees would still get the CCs. And you can't do anything about BCCs, because your mailserver and Mailman never see those at all.

The only effective way to *prevent* these extra copies is to suspend or ban users who do it. The best way to handle it is to teach your subscribers to de-duplicate their email. Most mail clients have a feature to do this.[1] Some email providers will do this for you (I think Gmail does?)

Acceptable aliases

This is a list, one per line, of addresses and regexps matching addresses that are acceptable in To: or Cc: in lieu of the list posting address when 'require_explicit_destination' is enabled.

This means that these addresses satisfy the requirement that the list be explicitly addressed (no BCCs to the list). It does not mean that posts with addressees who are not the list will be rejected.

2. Require Explicit Destination (this is a checked box. Could it be interfering with the Header filters?)

This means No BCCs To The List.

3. Default action to take when a member posts to the list

Accept immediately (bypass other rules)

This is why your size filter has no effect.

Default Processing: run additional checks and accept the message. NOTE - when set here, all members are blocked.

You need to figure out why this is happening. See Mark's parallel post for some useful questions to diagnose it. Most important, check all the header filters.

Footnotes: [1] The usual implementation is to delete or suppress later messages with the same Message-ID. Unfortunately, the first to arrive is usually the CC or BCC copy, which lacks the list's "decorations" on distributed posts. A few subscribers are sensitive to this inconsistency, and they'll have to make a choice. I recommend that list owners should not use this feature if the list copy will be deleted.

-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan

On 10/26/25 10:38, Cathryn McGuire wrote:

Since setting to Default Processing, ALL members posts are being held for moderation. That's what happened last time. Obviously there's some setting somewhere that's telling the list to do that with that setting. We'll try to find it by doing testing like you said. Meanwhile, we're quite busy in our other endeavours and having to unblock every post (some days more than others, and not that many relatively speaking) is what we're doing.

What is the reason given for the post being held? I don't know about affinity, but Postorius gives the reason in the list of held messages. Also the message itself has a X-Mailman-Rule-Hits: header that says which rule caused the message to be held

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