I plan on updating the wiki pages to reflect this thinking, but I would like to get feedback from y'all about the plan. It would be awesome if we could see a release of Mailman 2.2 some time in late 2007 or early 2008.
Comments, question?
All sounds very good. My two main problems with driving Mailman uptake here on campus are both to do with usability. The first is the current web interface, which was great when it was developed, but expectations have moved on. The second is the lack of a unified user database. So, it's great to see these items listed as the mail focus for 2.2 and 3.0 respectively.
WRT 2.2, I'd like to be able to offer something as simple to use as the list management features of Google Groups (which I use for some voluntary groups that I work with), but with the ability to expose additional functionality on request.
At our University we developed a customized mini Interface called 'simple' Interface. The normal mailman Interface is still there, called 'expert admin'. A (non working) demo is here: https://lists.uni-paderborn.de/listadm/demo.html The code does not use the mailman template system nor does it have multi language abilities. It even includes code specific to our installation. (We have a membership class that maps users to user in ldap and can create dynamic list with users from ldap + static users)
But maybe something like this should be included in future Mailman installation. Either a static simple interface or even a customizable simpe interface that is sufficent for 95% of the people (with well chosen defaults for your university/organisation)
WRT 3.0, for enterprise and education purposes, it's important to be able to hook into existing authentication and authorisation mechanisms. For us, that means LDAP - at least for authentication. On the other hand, we also have external people using our lists, so we need to be able to either put them into an SQL database which will work in conjunction with LDAP, or to add a separate LDAP tree for them, or something similar.
This is possible with mailman 2.1 with a self written Mailman Membershipt class. At least for List Member. If someone really needs this I could look into polishing the code and making it public.
Something that I've mentioned before, is the importance of preventing collateral spam. So, I'd like to be able to have my MTA ask Mailman whether a particular email address is permitted to post to a particular list, at SMTP time. I'm using Exim, which could call an external python script, but I'd rather be able to issue an SMTP callout to a running daemon, for efficiency. The callout would be executed after each "RCPT TO".
Same for Email that get rejected for spam reasons would be neat
Arne