[Mailman-Developers] mailman and the web

[Jerry Asher]

I would like to unify mailman with an ACS bboard.  The Open ACS 
(http://openacs.org) is a toolkit developing interactive community websites 
based on PostgreSQL and Tcl.  ACS Bboards are just what they sound like, a 
discussion forum in which visitors to a site can post questions, or post 
answers to the questions that others have asked.

Currently the ACS system is such that visitors can request that follow up 
answers be sent to them, which the ACS implements by creating hundreds of 
individual emails and mailing them out.  The "From" header is set to a 
bogus address (bboard-robot) and the Reply-To: header is set to the author 
of the new answer.   Vacation messages get sent back to the author of the 
post.  This means that if you reply to a message, the answer IS NOT posted 
on the bulletin board.

I would like to "unify" the ACS bulletin board code with "some" mailing 
list manager.  The benefits to the ACS toolkit I perceive would include:

  1  detecting/catching vacation messages
  2  detecting/catching/(and maybe unsubscribing) bounces
  3  ability to post directly to the bulletin from email
     (and have the posts end up in the right threads)

  4  but I am worried about mail loops.

Can someone tell me "how well" Mailman performs at detecting/catching 
vacation and bounce messages?

I know little about mailing lists, or Mailman, or mail headers.  But with a 
few pointers, I am willing to learn.

I wonder what the issues involved in this unification are?  Are the four 
issues I am interested/worried significant enough that it makes sense to 
want to delegate this to Mailman?  Or would it be easier/satisfactory to 
"just change the headers of the outgoing emails, and create some sort of 
procmail script to process new messages and post them into the right thread?

If you feel that unification would be useful for my purposes, can someone 
tell me the right "places" in Mailman to get started?  If I want to 
"inject" a message into Mailman for sending out to others, how would I do 
that?  If I wanted to "capture" the incoming message for processing, where 
do I look for that?  And how might I implement threading?

Thank you,

Jerry Asher
=====================================================
Jerry Asher                       jerry@hollyjerry.org
1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161    Tel: (510) 549-2980
Berkeley, CA 94709                Fax: (877) 311-8688