Cameron Simpson writes:
I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between mailman and a Discourse forum.
Yes.
None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which must be Discourse users.
That's not a problem in principle, because Mailman at python.org insists on list membership for posts. It could be a minor annoyance for users because Mailman allows a user to have a variety of email addresses, so you actually have to check which address you've been using. Perhaps people with multiple Mailman subscriptions would have to reconfigure their so they all use the address that Discourse knows, and their Mailman subscriptions to access mail from that address. I don't think that's a big deal, but it's there.
I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored.
That could be problematic. Not sure about that.
For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread.
This could work! I guess for "to message" replies it would cut Mailman out of the loop (the reply would go author -> Discourse -> Mailman), so it might be a little odd in the user's mail client and in Mailman archives (assuming they were desired and permitted).
The outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the fly when Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are set up to receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is preserved.
I don't see why that would be a big problem. Threading would be a little less robust, but would work 99% as well as with full References.
Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial.
I don't think that would be desired. It would be nice for users if existing Mailman User addresses could be grandfathered into Discourse just to save them ten minutes navigating the Discourse signup, but it's not obvious to me that's desirable or desired by Discourse admins. On the other hand, Discourse's members-only policy is basically the same as Mailman's, so we'd probably lose a boatload of python-dev lurkers, but nobody can complain about the principle. Steve