[Mailman-Developers] AOL's requirements for spam complaints

[Kevin McCann]

Brad Knowles wrote:

> At 10:44 PM -0800 2004/01/29, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
>
>>  Sorry, I don't buy this argument. If you have two choices: use
>>  more CPU time and network, or improve the end-user experience,
>>  choosing "less work for the computer" is almost always the wrong
>>  answer.
>
>
>     You know damn good and well that this is not a CPU issue.  This is 
> a disk I/O capacity issue (synchronous meta-data updates). Moreover, 
> you also know full well that there are serious performance issues with 
> enabling personalization mode on large mailing lists, such that for 
> some lists, it would simply be impossible to do.

Why is it, then, that Lyris can send personalized messages to lists with 
hundreds of thousands of members with no problem?  I don't personally 
have any lists that are nearly that big but I can tell you that my Lyris 
box sends messages to my lists with a few thousand members extremely 
quickly. Having personalization as a *choice* is the best thing. Then, 
those who worry about disk I/O or whatever can live with 
non-personalized delivery (at the expense of the users, of course), and 
those who want to move forward into the 21st century can do so with 
personalized delivery.

Mailing list communities want more now. Especially in Communities of 
Practice. Our most recent request was to tack on a person's professional 
profile (from another datasource) on the end of each message he or she 
sends. Feasible? Maybe, maybe not. But people do want this kind of 
thing. And I get paid to deliver what is needed. The fact is that Lyris 
does personalization just fine. So why continue to let Mailman lag behind?

Barry and others will be (or are) working on Mailman 3. I think that 
he/they should take a long hard look at the commercial MLM success story 
(Lyris) and take a few pages out of that book. They spent millions of 
dollars on R&D and made decisions base on it. Why not tap into that? 
Personalized delivery is just one thing. Don't get me started on SQL 
issues and the need for vastly improved logging for forensic purposes.

- Kevin