suggestion for Full Customization [Mailman-Developers]

[Brad Knowles]

At 1:03 AM +0200 2004/05/11, Stig Sandbeck Mathisen wrote:

>  Many customers, who normally only use the net for web and mail, would
>  prefer a mail being sent from Customer Service, and addressed to their
>  own address, so that they know the mail was sent to them, and that they
>  can hit reply to get help.
>
>  I would certainly prefer that, since a not insignificant fraction of the
>  users usually hits "reply to all" anyway.  This creates a lot of
>  unneccesary noise on the moderator interface.

	I've been thinking about this a bit more.  The attributes you're 
asking for seem to me to be more appropriate to a Customer Relation 
Manager system, not a mailing list management system.

	Any attempt to abuse a mailing list management system (e.g., 
Mailman) into functioning like a CRM are likely to be both 
unsuccessful and painful.

	I am a strong advocate of using the right tool for the right job, 
and I'm pretty sure that Mailman is absolutely not the right tool for 
this one.


	If you (or anyone else) had any patches to bring this kind of 
functionality into Mailman, and they could be guaranteed not to 
interfere with anything else, I would still be opposed to them, but 
there would be fewer logical arguments I could make to support my 
case.

	Certainly, I would be strongly opposed to anything that would 
make it easier to abuse Mailman into a spamming tool, so you'd need 
to make sure that you addressed that issue as thoroughly as possible 
in your patches.

	If that issue was addressed, then I'd be left with arguments 
relating to code bloat and size of the community (or potential 
community) that would benefit from such patches versus the amount of 
work that would be required to keep them from suffering excessive 
"bit rot".

	However, I think my most persuasive argument would probably be 
that this would be a slippery slope and the benefited user community 
would then be even more insistent on seeing additional modifications 
made in the future to further benefit them to the potential detriment 
of the rest of the Mailman community, and the expectations that would 
be set up that could cause these two groups to become adversarial 
towards each other, with all the resulting fallout, etc....

>  Yes, that same functionality could be used to spam, but in most cases it
>  won't.  Mailman is simply not efficient enough for that purpose. The
>  spammers use hundreds of thousands of worm-infected computers today, to
>  spread messages.

	Those are the end transmission systems for the bulk of the spam 
that is sent out, yes.  But there is plenty of spam being sent out 
that does not use bot-nets.  Moreover, the spam has to be injected 
into these bot-nets, and you would have to be very careful to make 
sure that these modifications don't make it easier to abuse Mailman 
towards that end.

>  I guess many of my problems could be solved by combining mailman
>  options, but I'd like a "this is an announcement list" option, that does
>  all this for me.

	I really don't think what you're asking for is appropriate to a 
mailing list management system.  Try Googling for "customer 
relationship management system", or words to that effect.


	At the ISP I use today, and where I previously worked for two 
years, they have a simple "POP Bulletin" system to achieve these 
goals, with the messages appearing to come from Customer Service and 
all replies being sent back to them.  No mailing list management 
system involved at all -- indeed no MTAs involved, and no extra 
copies of this message stored anywhere on the server, and no 
"deliveries" of this message to individual private mailboxes.  You 
can achieve the same sorts of things with a shared IMAP folder 
system, and subscribing all users to the appropriate shared folder(s).

	If you're not an ISP and you can't use "POP Bulletin" or IMAP 
shared folder solutions, then you'd be left with traditional CRM 
systems which do actually send out real e-mail messages.

-- 
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.

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.