[Adding mailman-developers]

On Jul 9, 2009, at 10:22 AM, Mark Sapiro wrote:

Stefan Förster wrote:

...

BTW - will MM3 be able to utilize the VERP features offered by many modern MTAs?

There are patches for Postfix which can probably be adapted for other MTAs. See the thread "Patch for use of Postfix VERP support"
starting at <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-users/2009-January/064588.html

...

.

This seems to be a good idea for future Mailman. I don't know if
Barry has thought about it for MM3, but I will look at it for 2.2.

I have, and it doesn't look difficult to do, although I really want to
rework the current delivery architecture so that it's more modular.
This would also allow different lists to have different delivery
mechanisms (e.g. bulk vs. individual) and should be more efficient and
more extensible.

VERPing is really only one half of the "personalization" or individual
delivery story. Ideally it's the half that would by default always be
enabled since it improves the reliability of your memberships. It's
this part that would benefit greatly from adding MTA-specific
support. I think Exim supports VERPing without an SMTP extension, and
I get the impression it can be made to work in Sendmail too.

The other half is really a "mail merge" operation, where the headers
and footers (currently, but maybe someday the email body) contains
placeholders that get filled in with personal information for the
specific user. I'm not aware of a standard way to do this in any MTA,
so I think if you want to do this kind of message body
personalization, you still have to do that in Mailman. I'd like to
support this better and would consider MTA-specific approaches.

Mailman also supports something called "full personalization" which
hacks other headers too. I put this in the category of mail merging
since I'm not aware of any MTAs providing support for that either.

-Barry