On Mon, 3 Jul 2006, Chris Lightfoot wrote:
>
> More generally this has got me wondering about how much of a
> mailing-list manager could be implemented within a modern MTA. It is
> painfully obvious that most of Mailman's queueing and aliasing stuff
> could equally well be implemented with Exim and a database and suitable
> transports. More difficult is what to do with the moderation queue
> aspect of the problem, which is required in some mailing lists.
Yes, the coupling between transport, database, and user interface is one
of the nastier aspects of Mailman's architecture.
Exim isn't quite studly enough to do all the things that Mailman offers,
in particular attachment policies and general MIME mangling. If Exim were
to have full support for SMTP extensions like 8BITMIME, BINARYMIME, and
UTF8SMTP, it would have to have a MIME parsing and mangling
infrastructure, and so fancy MLM stuff would be less of a problem to
implement.
For the moderation queue, probably the best way would be to deliver the
messages into an IMAP mailbox, which could be accessed by the MLM front
end using the usual webmail techniques. The MLM could even re-submit
moderated messages for transport using BURL (RFC 4468). Then your user
interface, transport, storage, and database infrastructure can be cleanly
separated using open protocols.
Speculation aside, your early checking stuff looks nice, especially since
we are replacing our old and busted list system with Mailman's new hotness...
Tony.
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