Dear Mailing List:
 
I own a confidential list which has subscribers from various nets
reached via gateways (Austrian X400, TU Vienna local net).
 
The adresses used to send mail to those people remain relatively
constant and contain no explicit gateways, they cause no troubles.
 
However, the adresses in the From: fields of mails from them to
Listserv change almost weekly: Gateways are changed, network naming
regulations change, routing tables seem to vary from day to day, some
people (especially those in computing centres) switch to another
primary machine (with different OS and different userids on a different
net) every second day or own and use many different userids...
 
All this, of course, causes them to be no longer recognized as
"private" by Listserv, and almost everything in connection with my
list is restricted to private for good reasons.
 
I am getting bored of changing their addresses (we are "by owner" and
"validate all") every second moment, especially because the old
addresses still work fine in the other direction, in spite of the
changes (moreover, most of these From: adresses tend to fail in the
other direction...)
 
Any advices???
 
Some ideas:
* Is it possible to have some kind of pattern matching when checking
  the identity of From: and the list members?
* Is it possible to strip any explicit gateways and replace the % by @?
  This would already solve many cases...
* Is it possible to have an alias database in Listserv? The list would
  contain the primary address to send list mail to, and the alias file
  would contain (for each primary address) all acceptable source
  addresses for 'private'. This would:
  + be most flexible
  + reduce the need to add/delete/change the primary addresses
  Perhaps there could even be commands which allow users to update
  their aliases by themselves (which I would enjoy very much).
  However, this introduces perhaps a new source of insecurities...
 
Any comments???
 
Greetings
 
************************************************************************
* Klaus Kusche                                                         *
* Research Institute for Symbolic Computation                          *
* Johannes Kepler University           Tel: +43 7236 3231 67           *
* A-4040 Linz                          Telex: (Austria) 22323 uni li a *
* Austria (Europe)                     Fax: +43 7236 3338 30           *
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* Bitnet:           K312240@AEARN                                      *
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