Mailman 3 member functions should "guess" address membership
Original LP Author: Stephen Turnbull , LP Link: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/514625
Feature request
Mailman 3 should try to fuzzily match unknown author addresses against the member database. For example, if "turnbull@sk.domain.tld" is subscribed, then "turnbull@shako.sk.domain.tld" probably is the same person. This could probably be efficiently implemented by storing domains in bigendian order, and testing for prefixes. Bonus points for matching on full name. For example, for me personally firstname@xemacs.org and lastname@xemacs.org both resolve to me, which could not be reasonably associated by algorithm, but I always use the same full name, which would be strong indication that it's me. Possibly matching on mailbox would also be useful, but only as an optimization to be confirmed by one of the other two (or maybe if the match is unique?)
Note that for the first example, the second "turnbull@shako" variant is today used only by spammers; I haven't sent a message with that "From" since 1995, and I doubt it's been used as "Sender" more than a very small handful of times since 2000. For this reason, the feature should never be automated. Instead, it should be part of the moderation interface. If a match is detected, then an option should appear saying something like "This address appears to be an alias for . [ ] Add as an alias for ."