I'd like to be able to get Mailman to deliver mail other than via SMTP-over-TCP. This is because I want to give the MTA (Exim) a special delivery mode option which I've found greatly improves SMTP connection reuse and general efficiency. I'd also like to avoid ident lookups etc.

I can see roughly two ways to do this:

1. Provide my own version of TrySMTPDelivery which calls /usr/sbin/sendmail (really Exim) with appropriate options.

2. Somehow get Python's smtplib to use sendmail -bs (and pass appropriate options to sendmail).

1 is easy to write; 2 looks somewhat harder without modifying both Python's smtplib and Mailman, and even then I have to do the 822 address parsing by hand[1]. However, I want to do 1 in a way that will get my patch accepted, so that I don't have to maintain the variant. I also want it to be configurable at runtime, of course.

So, what would be the canonical Python or Mailman way of doing this ? Enclose the body of TrySMTPDelivery in a big `if' ? Move the body into a new function and turn TrySMTPDelivery into a layer of indirection ?

Is such a change likely to be accepted in any case, or will I have to maintain a local version (which means I'll try for the patch with the lowest changed-lines-count) ?

Ian.

[1] Or read the source for Python's rfc822 module to find out whether it does dequoting right and what the output quoting conventions are - and even then I have to do 821 quoting myself.