[Mailman-Developers] == No Subject ==

[amk at amk.ca]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2003 at 01:09:00PM +0000, Mike Holderness wrote:
> and my want-a-lot:
> > >   3. provide a web-based interface to those email-discussions.

This seems to require a serious amount of work, enough that Mailman stops
being just a mailing list manager and starts looking like a generic message
storage system that supports multiple interfaces (mail, web, NNTP).  That's
a fine change of direction for Mailman 3.0, should Barry want to pursue it,
but it turns everything on its head.  Currently Mailman expends a lot of
effort on managing users and once a message is archived, Mailman never
really deals with it again.  In the new model, messages are just as
important as users.

Iain, a generic message store might provide a good project idea for you.  It
would be able to store messages, keeping track of author/subject/date/etc.
and handling threading.  It would be high-capacity, able to store lots of
messages and access them quickly.  There would be some defined API for
adding messages and for searching them; input could come from mail messages,
web forms, or NNTP postings, but you'd only do proof-of-concept
implementations, and maybe not all three of them.  Archived messages can be
viewed via NNTP and a Web interface; again, you might only produce a
proof-of-concept of these.

--amk