[Mailman-Developers] Building plug-ins for mailman.

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Aanand Shekhar Roy writes:

 > 1.As discussed with @Rashi007-Timed delay or timed delivery of messages -
 > Suppose I wish to post a
 > message to list but instead of composing and sending I prefer to send it
 > delayed like I wish to post a message at 4am but since i would be sleeping
 > at that time so what I can do,I will post my message at 10pm at night and
 > a delaying or timed delivery plugin can deliver it at 4am.

This really isn't a list feature, it's a general MUA feature.  It's
actually quite easy to do with a POSIX system: compose your message
and save it to a file, then

at 04:00
sendmail -t my.msg

It's also a resource hog on the server: if a lot of people do this
with large attachments (eg, so all recipients get biffed at 9am), you
could end substantially increasing the space required by the queue.

Finally, the mechanism would be finicky: it would have to be contained
in the message, so a header (or pseudo-header) field like "Approved".

Despite all the above, it might still be a useful feature, but IMO
doing it well would be "hard" for a student.  If you can do a good job
on that, you should skip student and just go for mentor (except that
student pays a lot better!) or even start your own consulting firm. :-)

 > 2.Limited post by specific members - Being the list owner, I wish
 > to restrict the number of posts one can do on the mailing list.Like
 > a specific set of members can post 1 post per day,another set of
 > members can do 10 posts per day.

Generalizing this to a more flexible automoderation system might be a
good GSoC project all by itself.  Eg, I know a lot of moderators (and
even more subscribers!) who would love to have long threads throttled
(the first 10 messages delivered immediately, the next 10 with 3 hours
delay, the next 10 with 6 hours delay, and after that doubling delay
every 10 posts.

 > 3.Gmail has a plug-in system that allows listing of all your email
 > subscriptions and unsubscribe with one-click from every list you don't
 > read anymore...that will save much time unsubscribing to a lot of email
 > lists and newsletters that you never read.Can we have one for
 > mailman?

Not feasible.  Gmail is an MUA, it knows what you read (more exactly,
what you click on.  Mailman is not; it doesn't know whether you read
the posts it sends to you or not.

However, Shanu Salunke's "MI" project (Systers GSoC 2013) had some
functionality to make managing subscriptions on one server easier:
https://github.com/DardieD/MI.