[Mailman-Developers] Requirements for a new archiver

[Barry Warsaw]

On Wed, 2003-10-29 at 23:26, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	There, I have to disagree.  Both the web server and the mail 
> server issues are complex enough that I don't believe it would be a 
> good idea to try and re-invent this wheel.  There are already enough 
> bad web server and mail server implementations out there -- we don't 
> need to make this situation worse.

Let's not discount the integration problems, which are a huge headache
for newbies.  I'm fairly certain that Twisted is the right approach for
surfacing the web u/i to Mailman.  The requirements are not overwhelming
and fronting Mailman's u/i with Apache really doesn't buy us that much. 
We all agree that CGI sucks, and we could make that better with
mod_python or some other such glue, but why go to the trouble?

Relying on Twisted for the incoming mail protocols is something I'm less
certain about, although there is a lot of appeal to this approach.  We
could throw lots smarts into a Python port-25 listener, including global
spam fighting and bounce processing.  An approach like Exim + elspy
affords some really cool possibilities.  A bigger negative is that
there's less precedence for proxying smtpd as there is for httpd, so
it's harder to fit Mailman into the mix with an existing mail server.

-Barry