On Jan 31, 2010, at 10:05 PM, Karl O. Pinc wrote:

As long as I'm requesting features, it'd be nice if the mailman archive was able to support access via the imap protocol.

Yes, that's something I definitely want to do.

I would think it would make more sense to structure the archive in such a way that any old imap server could be used rather than build imap protocol support into mailman itself, but that's not for me to say.

There's no way I'm going to build (or maintain!) an imap server for Mailman. Although details should be discussed on the mailman-developers list, my plan is to provide something like the current archiver interface to allow Mailman to 'send' messages to some service that would process the messages for a particular imap server. For example, there might be an implementation of that interface for dovecot via maildir, or for whatever Twisted's imap server wants.

The tricky part IMO is access control. For example, a list's imap folder should generally be world readable, except for private mailing lists, but only list and site admin should have write access to the folder.

I'd also like to support a use case where list moderation could be handled through the imap interface. E.g. instead of a web page, a moderator could approve or discard messages just by moving them between imap folders for the list.

-Barry