[Mailman-Developers] any interest in a new built-in web-archive? (i.e. pipermail replacement)

[David Jeske]

> - Stable URLs, RFC 5064 + X-Message-ID-Hash.
> See the above links.  If you can implement the
> `IArchiver.permalink()` method and ensure that even if
>  completely wiped and regenerated from the
> underlying raw messages, your URLs
>  will remain stable, I think you will have won. :)

This is really trivial to implement.

HOWEVER, it also has two notable problems.

First, if the sender-selected-messageID is trusted to make a unique-id and
permalink, then you are trusting senders, which IMO is a bad idea. What
happens when senders intentionally duplicate a message-id? It's pretty hard
to do anything smart when the listprocessor doesn't track messageids.

Second, when message-id uniqueness breaks, it's often not an isolated
instance, but a pattern of software doing bad things.

I prefer generating a trustably unique message IDs, even if those are only
used internally. I've used partial-content hashes in the past, but they
have their tradeoffs. They are hard to abuse, since matching a content hash
tends to mean supplying the same content, which kinda prevents abuse.
However, if the content is being changed at all (intentionally or not),
they breakdown.

---

I like your ideas about plug-in text-match-formatters. We have something
like that in the willowmail system, and it's pretty useful. (auto-linking
fedex tracking numbers in email is one example)

> - Merging of forums, archives, newsgroups, and IMAP.

You like to bite off the big ones eh? NNTP, then IMAP.

Does anyone even use fat-mail-clients anymore? Even the IMAP clients I've
used in recent years have been web-based..... which is kinda already
unified with web-based archives since they are both in the browser. :)

Seriously though, what is the goal here?

I suppose I've had one thought over the years, which is that sometimes it
seems weird that I have all these mailing lists delivering into my mail
client. In theory my mail client could be 'faking' the whole thing with
NNTP to a known archive location.

However, that only works when online. If you have to do delivery to my
client, who cares if it's SMTP/NNTP/IMAP? I say pick the simplest one
(SMTP), which works with all mail clients, no changes, and allows you to
keep your messages when the archive goes down.

As for mail-client integration features... I like mail-client push-button
unsubscribe. I like the idea of making it trivial for mail clients to
recognize mailing lists posts and auto-configure filter-to-folder for them.
Neither of these require NNTP/IMAP in the archive though.