[Mailman-Users] Re: broadcast only

[Harold Paulson]

>This is basically the issue of mailman getting better at scaling to 
>large lists

That is certainly an issue, but when I say I'd like mailman to be 
more "broadcast list friendly", I'm referring to something a little 
different.

I'm thinking of things like ease of creating new broadcast lists. 
I'm using Dan Mick's patch to allow each list to have its own 
templates (did this make it into 2.0 final?) so at least they are 
possible, but they generally require a lot of custom coding to be 
useful.  Of course there are a mess of preferences that need to be 
flipped over, Aliases added, etc...  In other words, I can't just 
turn on a new broadcast list for a client/user and let them play with 
it.  I create the list, spend an hour doing the initial setup for 
them, and then an hour or two explaining how it works, and an hour 
over the next couple months answering the odd questions that pop up.

I know you have personally mentioned wanting to move mailman to a 
user-centric architecture, instead of one's email address being the 
basic unique unit.  That would move things closer to being able to 
integrate the MLM into an external database[1]

Optional passwords.  This has been expounded on enough, I think.

I'd like to see a web form for sending an email to a list.

HTML templates.  Mailman's web interface looks like it was written by 
programmers :)   It would be cool to have a button that would spill 
out the HTML  required for a simple subscribe or unsubscribe form.

Having whined for features.... I don't do Python (not yet at least) 
but I've done my share of web programming.  I'd be willing to code 
any of the web features I've mentioned if someone else was willing to 
do the real work...

	- H



[1] This is sort of a pet peeve of mine.  There are lots of great web 
apps out there, and they all implement their own authentication and 
data storage systems, so you either have to rewrite stuff yourself, 
or your users have to log in to use each and every tool in the 
toolbox.  Maybe it's just that the web is still a fairly immature 
technology...



Harold Paulson                  Sierra Web Design
haroldp at sierraweb.com           http://www.sierraweb.com
VOICE: 775.833.9500             FAX:   810.314.1517