I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between mailman and a Discourse forum. On 10Dec2022 21:21, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephenjturnbull@gmail.com> wrote:
Since Mailman (and its users!) expects messages to arrive asynchronously and handles that using threading information, as far as I can see the Mailman side is handled as well as it can be now that Discourse provides threading information, and you just subscribe Mailman to Discourse.
That would work for receiving Discourse posts into the Mailman mailing list.
And obviously we can just sign up Discourse to Mailman.
Can we? If you're talking about posts from the mailing list appearing on Discourse, this isn't trivial.
The latter direction may be harder, depending on whether Discourse can make sense of batches of messages being composed independently of its message flow.
It (anecdotally, link lower down) looks like you can make a new Topic (thread) on Discourse if your user has a sufficient trust level (discourse users become more trusted over time). But the message author needs to be a Discourse user. So either all the individual mailman users need to be Discourse members _or_ the from address needs to be a list-wide id (eg the list submission address), but then the posts won't have the right author on the Discourse side. 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.
The fact that Discourse didn't provide threading information to email users in the past suggest that it has an alternative mechanism for organizing mail flows, and message IDs and Reference headers from email may not be so easily integrated.
No, that stuff works ok now. For new Topics (threads) this post: https://discourse.gnome.org/t/email-use-of-discourse-how-to-start-a-new-thre... sugggests that you can email to a specific category and I presume it would appear as a new Topic. I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored. For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread. 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 know nothing about Discourse internals, but I suspect that's going to be the difficult part if there is one. With a little luck that will be no problem. ;-)
I know a little, but not a lot. In short: copying the Discourse stuff to mailman could be done by subscribing the mailman list to the Discourse forum. Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not trivial. Cheers, Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>