[Mailman-Developers] Adding headers to mailman generated mails

[Brad Knowles]

At 6:56 PM -0500 2004/01/22, Barry Warsaw wrote:

>  I had been thinking along the lines of the language for specifying the
>  data source as a db connection and a SQL command.

	We were working on a method to send a specially MIME-formatted 
message to identify the various potential bodyparts, a list of 
recipients and who gets which bodyparts, then a language for 
specifying the template which pulls in the appropriate bodyparts for 
the appropriate recipients (and ways to insert bits of information 
about the user themselves into the message).

>  That's certainly tricky, but I think it's got to boil down to privilege
>  or authentication.  It would still make me nervous to accept such jobs
>  from other than sites I control.

	Yup.

>                                             I'm just hand-waving here of
>  course, and the rest is left as a simple matter of engineering <wink>.

	Yeah.  Hand-waving.  Right.

>  I should mention that I'm specifically interested in increasing the
>  efficiency between Mailman and its local worker MTAs.

	The problem is that this is a very small piece of the overall 
puzzle, and you're talking about a lot of things that others might 
also want in other areas.  MTA authors are going to be primarily 
concerned about overall optimization of the MTA in general, and 
certain employers of certain authors might be concerned about things 
like WAN efficiency over other things.

	I can tell you that with some relatively minor modifications to 
sendmail, the folks at InfoBeat/Mercury Mail found that they got 
things to the point where sendmail was no longer the bottleneck -- 
pulling the data out of the database was the big problem, and much 
more difficult to solve.

>                                                         These are all
>  systems under my control so I should be able to tune them, set up
>  privileges, common data source access, etc. to make things work as
>  smoothly as possible until the message hits the external outgoing
>  interface.

	You're talking about picking up a small piece of the puzzle which 
is likely to have significant components which will be difficult or 
nearly impossible to solve.

	I think there are other areas in which I would be inclined to 
focus my attentions within Mailman, at least as far as efficiency is 
concerned.  Instead of using pickles, try Berkeley db b-trees, and 
use that as your "queue" to be processed.  The reason here is that 
b-trees are designed for lightning-fast cursor access, and all you 
need to do is make sure it's indexed on certain key fields.  Let 
Berkeley db take care of the reliability issues (what happens if 
there's a crash), efficiently caching information in memory for 
maximum performance, etc....


>  I'm not even touching the 3rd rail of putting the MTA /in/ Mailman any
>  more :).

	That solution is called L-Soft Listserv, with LSMTP.  In fact, 
you're talking about some of the same sorts of things that they do, 
only you don't want to own both pieces of code that are implementing 
the desired standard, which will make solving the problem orders of 
magnitude more difficult.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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