Vaibhav Lohani writes:

Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull.stephen.fw@u.tsukuba.ac.jp> wrote:

...

What sort of integration do you have in mind?

The idea is to have a two way binding sort of integration, where the conversations can be carried out in discourse as well as mailing list mode.

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. Also, once you've got the basic syncing functionality down, it would be interesting to see if you could provide a mail protocol for manipulating Discourse features (likes, badges, etc) via the email interface. (This might be almost trivial if Discourse already provides such a protocol for email.)

the mailman rest api should not be opened publicly,

The Mailman REST API is there to be used. The problem is that access is not authenticated at this point: anyone who can access it has the run of the installation. So everybody who has access to the REST API is effectively the site manager. Since you are planning to host the Discourse and Mailman instances on the same server, this should not be a problem. But you should be aware that that Mailman API will be firewalled from the Internet in any public instance for the foreseeable future.

Hope this helps.

Steve