Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
The big issue here is that Discourse provides a centralized server, which means that conversations can be serialized properly, and you can even be notified if somebody else is replying at the same time. Mailing lists are asynchronous, so that posts often "cross in the mail". While these two modes are *fundamentally* incompatible, so cannot be perfectly merged, it's important that the two systems behave as much like each other as possible. In particular, you can't assume that mailing list subscribers will be using a browser. Many people use dedicated mail clients. Yes this is correct. But, mailing lists are also hosted on centralised server, so we can try to synchronize them on the server. Although the level of dynamic binding between client and server may get little bit reduced as compared to discourse which is browser based and synced with centralised server in real time.
But you should be aware that that Mailman API will be firewalled from the Internet in any public instance for the foreseeable future. Hitting the mailman api from the discourse front end in public browser would have eased the process of binding messages from discourse to mailman. With this, mailman and discourse instances even on different servers could have integrated with each other. Now without this, we will have to host the whole integrated package on the same server. This would also require to do some modifications in discourse api to notify mailman api on the same server about some new message.
Please suggest if anyone else has some other better design. Also, if anyone is interested to work on this.
Thanks and Regards, Vaibhav Lohani