making Mailman CAN-SPAM compliant (was Re: [Mailman-Developers] Hashing member passwords in config.pck)

[Kevin McCann]

Tobias Eigen wrote:

>>>  What I envision having in my Mailman/Mambo system is a single user
>>>  database with one password per username for all services. Users can
>>>  then go to a simple preferences page on Mambo and do basic things
>>>  like change their email address or password, tick a box to opt in/out
>>>  of various mailings, and in particular opt to receive no mail at all.
>>

Hello Tobias,

I have been meaning to respond to several of your emails lately, but 
free time has been scarce. We seem to have the same goal, and many 
people are looking for the same thing, too -- a Yahoogroups-ish 
solution. I looked at Mailman for this for quite a while before coming 
to the realization that it just wasn't going to happen easily. There are 
simply too many problems with MM 2.x: one-to-one relationships between 
members and lists, awkward pickle file storage, limited customization 
capabilities and much more. To me, radical changes are required in the 
mailing list software. And I believe this needs to happen in the Mailman 
3 project due to the considerable design changes required. Barry is 
already looking at significant changes for MM3 such as SQL-based storage 
(this in itself is huge for our purposes), so I would suggest that 
efforts should be spent there.

I'd like to invite you to work with my organization, Bellanet, in any 
way possible. We are also in the international development sector and 
have been wanting to create an open source version of our Dgroups 
product (see www.dgroups.org)  using Mailman and a CMS. In our case we 
were favoring Xaraya. But MM 2.x just wasn't going to cut it. We are 
looking at putting $ into MM3, and, as it turns out, we want some 
African developer involvement. Please contact me off-list if you're 
interested in brainstorming. I really want to help move MM3 development 
forward -- with money and/or people -- so that creating a YahooGroups 
tool, using your favorite CMS as a frontend, would be a cinch.

BARRY:  would now be a good time to re-energize discussions on the MM3 
development list? What is your time like? And are there any plans for a 
MM3 sprint? I can send people.

- Kevin