How do I respond to a held message notification to accept or discard the message?
If the list's General Options -> admin_immed_notify attribute is Yes, when a list post is held for moderator action, a notice is sent to the list's owner and moderator addresses. This email has the following MIME structure:
multipart/mixed
- text/plain
- Information about the held message
- A copy of the held message
- A message which says:
- If you reply to this message, keeping the Subject: header intact, Mailman will discard the held message. Do this if the message is spam. If you reply to this message and include an Approved: header with the list password in it, the message will be approved for posting to the list. The Approved: header can also appear in the first line of the body of the reply.
The Subject and From of the outer message are:
Subject: LISTNAME post from user@example.com requires approval From: LISTNAME-owner@example.net
The Subject and From of the second message/rfc822 part are:
Subject: confirm <a long string of hex digits> From: LISTNAME-request@example.net
The key thing here is the text that says "If you reply to this message ..." is referring to the message in the second message/rfc822 part, not the outer message.
This means in particular that in order to work, the reply, with or without the Approved: header must be sent To: LISTNAME-request@example.net with Subject: confirm <the long string of hex digits> (the Subject: can also be "Re: confirm <the long string of hex digits>". If you reply to the outer message, your reply goes To: LISTNAME-owner@example.net, and you just get a copy of your reply sent back to the owners/moderators.
Some MUAs make it easy to reply to a message/rfc822 subpart and some do not, but you don't really need to 'reply'. Sending any message To: LISTNAME-request@example.net with Subject: confirm <the long string of hex digits> and with or without the Approved: header as desired will work.