[Mailman-Developers] Re: Requirements for a new archiver

[David Champion]

* On 2003.10.27, in <1067300194.1066.39.camel at anthem>,
*	"Barry Warsaw" <barry at python.org> wrote:
> 
> Which does point to an alternative direction -- maybe we don't need any
> direct connection to an html archive.  Maybe the archiver should just be
> a separate process that reads messages from the NNTP interface a MM3
> might export.  Just blue-skying here.

That's pretty much the ideological basis for what I have done. We have
message-delivery protocols, and tools that know about messages; why keep
trying to reinvent them over HTTP? My ideal list manager would export
IMAP and/or NNTP interfaces, or would have a channel for providing
messages and authentication to something else that exposes IMAP or NNTP
(which is the route I took). Nobody needs web access: what they need is
access via a web browser. With browsers that understand NNTP and IMAP
prevalent, and with a wide selection of web-mail and web-news gateways
for the cases where that doesn't work, this is sufficient.

I favor IMAP over NNTP for this:

1. it appeals more to the way regular people think about lists: it's
   their mail, only it's on a server. Most people aren't much aware of
   or concerned with the similarities between news/NNTP and mail/IMAP.

2. many people have IMAP software. Fewer have or understand how to use
   NNTP software.

3. my server has mostly private lists, and I'm unsatisfied with the
   state of NNTP authentication compared to IMAP authentication. I
   want this primarily for archives that people need to authenticte
   to, not lists whose archives should be exposed to the public.

But integrating with both is even better.

-- 
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