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Disguising Mailing List URLs

Is it possible to disguise the URL of public Mailman pages, such as the list info and archive pages?

For example, suppose I have a list, list@foo.com. The list information page would appear at:

http://whatever.hostingrails.com/mailman/listinfo/list_foo.com

But I would like it to appear at:

http://foo.com/mailman/listinfo/list_foo.com

I tried an Apache rewrite rule with the Proxy Throughput flag, as suggested in the URL Rewriting Guide (Dynamic Mirror section). Here is the rule I used: 
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^mailman/(.*)$   http://whatever.hostingrails.com/mailman/$1 [P]
But, the rule doesn't fire, and I get only a blank page. I know the rule is good, because if I change "mailman" (on the left side) to anything else, it works fine. So it seems that there is a higher Apache rule on the server that is intercepting the request to "mailman" URLs.

I am fine with using a different word than "mailman", but there is also the trouble that all the links that Mailman generates will use "whatever.hostingrails.com" instead of "foo.com", which defeats the purpose.

Is there some way to make Mailman use the URL I want? Or another way to disguise the URL?

2008-08-27 06:25 PM

Hello,

I have checked this issue in detail and tried googling around for possible workarounds to suite your requirements. But I couldn't find any workarounds.

>>So it seems that there is a higher Apache rule on the server that is intercepting the request to "mailman" URLs.

Yes, that is true. Also note that the mailman software is installed globally on the server. And all the account users (shared server accounts) mailing lists are available at a centralized path location.
(I.E) they are not present in individual account's home directory.

This is the reason why the URL gets redirected as http://whatever.hostingrails.com/mailman/listinfo/list_foo.com

where 'whatever.hostingrails.com' is the shared server's hostname. Also since this is located at a central location, the mailing lists are named as 'listname_domain-name'

I did find some links suggesting methods to change the hostname, but this change will have a global effect and since this is a shared server we won't be able to do so.

2008-08-28 03:24 AM

Regards,
Rahul
Okay, thank you for the effort Rahul. I will just live with the whatever.hostingrails.com URL. :)

2008-08-28 02:25 PM


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