[Mailman-Developers] TOPICS (was bounce processing question and idea for future enhancements...)

[Harald Meland]

[Jeff Hahn]

> Listserv topics work like this:
> 
> Messages sent to the list include one or more keywords (topics) in the
> subject.  There is a defined set of topics for the list.  Subscribers can
> choose to receive messages for individual topics.
> 
> When the MLM receives a message, it extracts the topics from the subject.
> To deliver a message, the MLM intersects the set of topics in the message
> with the set of topics that a given subscriber has chosen (to use set
> terminology). If the intersection is non-empty, that subscriber gets the
> message, otherwise not.
> 
> there is usually an "ADMIN" topic that is sent to ALL listmember and has
> restricted posting.  Subscribers can choose whether or not to "subscribe to
> New topics automatically", so that when topics are added, the member list
> can be updated.
> 
> Messages without a valid topic are optionally rejected.

My feelings on this are rather mixed: While I can see the use
something like this would have when your users are inexperienced, I'm
still not sure that I would be able to tell it apart from some
featuritis-infected hack :)

Anyhow, I guess that implementing this would be a lot easier (and
cleaner) if every list member had some "user objects" -- and that is
planned for after 1.0.  So I guess we'll think about it all until we
have the infrastructure to implement it on top of in place.
-- 
Harald