Twenty years ago, I attended the first Python Workshop at NIST with about 20 other old school Pythonistas. Earlier this month I attended PyCon 2015 in Montreal. PyCon is always exhilarating, but this one was incredibly special for me personally, because my son was on spring break and joined me for the first half of the conference.
Both the Python language and its community have grown a little bit <wink> in the intervening years, but what hasn't changed is our love of the language, and the truly amazing people we share that love with. The Python community really is one of the very best open source communities on the planet.
The best community inside that great Python family has to be the GNU Mailman team. They're all smart and cool, fun to hang out with, and fun to hack with. With diverse backgrounds, each and every one are good friends and valued technical peers. As has been the case for the last few years, we've sprinted on Mailman 3, getting lots of great work done, but never quite getting something we were satisfied enough with to release. The first alpha of Mailman 3 was released a little over 7 years ago.
And so I'm here --and on behalf of Abhilash, Aurélien, Florian, John, Mark, Stephen, Sumana, Terri, our GSoC students, and all the great people who have contributed over the years-- to proudly announce the official release of GNU Mailman 3.0, code named "Show Don't Tell".
Mailman 3 is really a suite of 5 tools:
The core, which provides the mail delivery engine, the unified user model, moderation and modification of email messages, and interfaces to external archivers;
Postorius, our new Django-based web user interface for users and list administrators;
HyperKitty, our new Django-based web archiver, providing rich access to the historical record of mailing list traffic;
mailman.client, the official Python bindings to the core's REST API;
mailman-bundler, a set of scripts to make it easy to deploy the full suite inside Python virtual environments.
What's new about Mailman 3? Well, lots! Some highlights include:
Backed by a relational database;
True support for multiple domains, with no cross-domain mailing list naming restrictions;
One user account to manage all your subscriptions on a site;
The core's functionality exposed through an administrative REST+JSON API;
All passwords hashed by default, and no monthly password reminders!
Users can post to lists via the web interface;
Built-in archive searching!
and more. Tons more.
There will be things you love about Mailman 3, and things you don't like. You'll glimpse great possibilities and glaring holes. You'll be excited and frustrated. Such is life with an all-volunteer free software project.
For the things you like, and the exciting possibilities, we encourage you to experiment, to do wacky things we haven't thought of, integrate it with your own tools, or just carefully go about deploying a Mailman 3 system. Tell us how you're using it!
For the things you don't like, we invite you to join us. Come to the mailing list mailman-developers@python.org and talk with us. Submit bug reports and pull requests. Help us close the gaps and make Mailman 3 better.
Whether your interests are for Internet RFCs, web site development, operations, or you just want to find a fun Python project to hack on with cool people, as they say, contributions are welcome.
See the release notes, as well as links to download each component:
http://wiki.list.org/Mailman3You probably want to start with the bundler and let it grab and install all the other parts.
More information is available at:
http://www.list.org
http://wiki.list.org
http://launchpad.net/mailman
#mailman on freenode
mailman-developers@python.orgHappy Mailman Day, -Barry & the Mailman Cabal