[Mailman-Developers] Mailman roadmap

[Arne Schwabe]

>> I plan on updating the wiki pages to reflect this thinking, but I
>> would like to get feedback from y'all about the plan.  It would be
>> awesome if we could see a release of Mailman 2.2 some time in late
>> 2007 or early 2008.
>>
>> Comments, question?
>>     
>
> All sounds very good. My two main problems with driving Mailman uptake here 
> on campus are both to do with usability. The first is the current web 
> interface, which was great when it was developed, but expectations have 
> moved on. The second is the lack of a unified user database. So, it's great 
> to see these items listed as the mail focus for 2.2 and 3.0 respectively.
>
> WRT 2.2, I'd like to be able to offer something as simple to use as the 
> list management features of Google Groups (which I use for some voluntary 
> groups that I work with), but with the ability to expose additional 
> functionality on request.
>
>   
At our University we developed a customized mini Interface called
'simple' Interface. The normal mailman Interface is still there, called
'expert admin'. A (non working) demo is here:
https://lists.uni-paderborn.de/listadm/demo.html The code does not use
the mailman template system nor does it have multi language abilities.
It even includes code specific to our installation. (We have a
membership class that maps users to user in ldap and can create dynamic
list with users from ldap + static users)

But maybe something like this should be included in future Mailman
installation. Either a static simple interface or even a customizable
simpe interface that is sufficent for 95% of the people (with well
chosen defaults for your university/organisation)



> WRT 3.0, for enterprise and education purposes, it's important to be able 
> to hook into existing authentication and authorisation mechanisms. For us, 
> that means LDAP - at least for authentication. On the other hand, we also 
> have external people using our lists, so we need to be able to either put 
> them into an SQL database which will work in conjunction with LDAP, or to 
> add a separate LDAP tree for them, or something similar.
>   
This is possible with mailman 2.1 with a self written Mailman
Membershipt class. At least for List Member. If someone really needs
this I could look into polishing the code and making it public.
> Something that I've mentioned before, is the importance of preventing 
> collateral spam. So, I'd like to be able to have my MTA ask Mailman whether 
> a particular email address is permitted to post to a particular list, at 
> SMTP time. I'm using Exim, which could call an external python script, but 
> I'd rather be able to issue an SMTP callout to a running daemon, for 
> efficiency. The callout would be executed after each "RCPT TO".
>
>
>   
Same for Email that get rejected for spam reasons would be neat

Arne