[Mailman-Developers] A couple of archiving questions

[Barry Warsaw]

Steve's explained most of the current thinking on archiving, and as you
observe, archiving is a push interface (from Mailman to the archivers).

At one point I thought about having a sort of built-in archiver that wasn't
any smarter than just an maildir or some other dump on-disk dump.  Mailman 2
has its mbox files and Mailman 3 has its IMessageStore interface, but we don't
use it for much.  What we should probably do add the message to the message
store once it's been approved for posting.  Someone could probably write that
as an IHandler in about 5 minutes.

(Messages held for moderation are added to the store, and held messages are
available through the moderation REST API, but those are for different
functionality.  The work to reject duplicate Message-IDs involves adding the
messages to the store *before* they're approved.)

Once you have that, then you could pretty easily add generic access to the
message store in the REST API.  What you'd need is some way to know *which*
messages to pull.  That's when things get complicated and tricky I think.

Cheers,
-Barry