[Mailman-Developers] Re: way to minimize IO load with MTA supported VERP

[J C Lawrence]

On Thu, 6 Dec 2001 22:14:35 -0500 
Barry A Warsaw <barry@zope.com> wrote:

>>>>>> "JCL" == J C Lawrence <claw@kanga.nu> writes:

JCL> Mailman is going to end up with a set of MTA-specific and
JCL> internally configurable VERP configurations to chose from.

> I actually don't think that MTA-directed VERPing helps us out
> much.  

Its a question of publics and their needs.  There are large and
desperately unfilled needs for body-customisation in list servers to
be sure.  That's an untapped market.  Its also a non-traditional MLM
market.  VERP, for Mailman, solves fundamental problems in bounce
handling and membership roll maintenance, and the majority of
Mailman's current and traditional userbase are going to be wildly
interested in that, not in message body customisation.

Which doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't do both, just that (at
least initially) the target consumers are rather different.

> Sure, it can give us an envelope sender that we can use for better
> bounce detection[*], but I think that the much more interesting
> personalization is content personalization.  I.e. inserting into
> the message body, footers, headers, RFC 2822 headers,
> etc. information specific to the recipient.  Only Mailman knows
> that data and how to interpolate it into the message body.  AFAIK,
> there's no way to coordinate this with the MTA, so content
> personalization is always going to be performed by Mailman.

Yup.  Not a whole lot of argument going on at this end.

> The VERP-like approach in MM2.1 toward the envelope sender is
> mostly just gravy.  (I try to be careful to describe it as
> VERP-like since it isn't technically VERP.)

<nod>

Technical precision terminology: always bites you in the arse when
you're trying to say something useful.

> BTW, see VERP_REGEXP and VERP_FORMAT for how the envelope sender
> is composed and parsed.

Will do.  I'm behind on my 2.1 reading (been looking into a CRM
system to bolt Mailman into).

> [*] VERP helps with knowing exactly which address on which list is
> bouncing, but I don't think it helps much with knowing the
> severity of the bounce.

It doesn't.  I'm strongly tempted to treat all bounces as hard,
unless we can cheaply _and_ conclusively determine that they are
soft.

-- 
J C Lawrence                
---------(*)                Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas. 
claw@kanga.nu               He lived as a devil, eh?		  
http://www.kanga.nu/~claw/  Evil is a name of a foeman, as I live.