[Mailman-Developers] Postorius and verified email addresses

[Simon Hanna]

On 04/07/2016 01:29 AM, Barry Warsaw wrote:
> On Apr 07, 2016, at 12:26 AM, Simon Hanna wrote:
> 
>> Short version: it supports both external (social) and internal (django) auth
>> systems and offers options to combine/switch between them . Allauth provides
>> Signals that I used to verify the addresses in Mailman.
> 
> I think we have to decide how and where addresses will be verified.  Are they
> going to be via confirmations emailed by core or via Postorius?
> 
> I think the core has to support emailed confirmation messages because
> Postorius is technically an optional component.  So if a site were to build
> their own REST front-end, they'd at least want to allow the core to handle
> email verifications without having to build that into their front-end.
I don't mind the core being able to handle verfications. But I'm pretty sure everyone that offers a
web interface for managing mailman will want the ability to confirm emails using http links. I don't
see a reason why we should implement that in mailman, if it can easily be added in the front-end.
Doing this has one downside in my opinion. Storing the same addresses in several places (which isn't
bad perse, as a matter of fact microservices encourage duplicating data and synchronizing it)
would need synchronization. Ideally mailman would offer signals for various events that front-ends
can hook in to. They would probably be similar to the hyperkitty archiver plugin I guess.

Another thing I believe in is blocking access until an account is confirmed, which really shouldn't
depend on mailman. While postorius might be a project that should always have an active connection
to the core, and archive doesn't necessarily need it.
> 
> That doesn't necessarily prevent Postorius from doing it, and when used with
> Persona, we see how nicely that can work.  It's also of course possible that
> any 3rd party front-end will have its own way of verifying email addresses.
> 
> The other thing to think about is that the core already must know how to talk
> to the outgoing MTA, to provide proper reputation services, signing, etc.  I
> don't know that we want to make site admins have to configure that in two
> places, and we almost certainly don't want Postorius to send out emails
> directly.
Sorry but I have to disagree with that. Postorius _has_ to be able to send out mails.
In case any server errors occur, django tries to send out emails to administrators defined in the
settings. I strongly recommend setting this up for a production system.
The mta should take care of the rest (dkim signatures, ...). If you are referring to gpg signing and
encryption, there are django apps for that. A quick search revealed
https://github.com/stephenmcd/django-email-extras
I haven't tried it, but I don't think it would be that hard to integrate if the core supports them.

There is one more issue that needs to be discussed which is relevant to all templates: Translation.
Django has builtin methods to translate and through the browser's preferred language can choose one.
The core would require associating a language with each user in the settings.

>From a usability point of view I would like Postorius to be able to set all templates and not just
link to files in mailman. There are a couple of businesses that manage thousands of lists and I
guess they would appreciate it if list owners could do this without direct access to the mailman server.