On Nov 09, 2013, at 06:10 PM, Colin Fleming wrote:

Thanks for the comments, Steve - can you clarify what you mean by a "write-only API"? As far as I can tell I could use that to insert messages that Mailman now considers "posted to the list" into my own DBMS and then present them however I like. I'll have a bunch of questions around robustness and error handling, but is that not basically the case?

It is. The IArchiver API is not part of the REST API; it's not an external API that clients can talk to. It's an internal API that Mailman uses exactly as you say - it's a generic way to get messages posted to the list into other services, structured around the needs of archivers.

I like the idea of Hyperkitty returning fairly plain HTML that I could later style, although having a REST API that would allow me to get at thread objects which contained a tree of message objects would probably be ideal. I suspect that's fairly trivial for me to implement assuming my assumptions about IArchiver are correct.

IArchiver is part of Mailman core, not Hyperkitty. In fact, it's the way messages posted to mailing lists get *into* Hyperkitty. :)

-Barry