[Mailman-Users] Funding Campaign for GNU Mailman

[Abhilash Raj]

Hello Everyone,

As most of you already know, Mailman 3 is the new and improved version with extra features, better security and much better architecture. We released Mailman Suite 3.0 in April 2015 and have come a long ways since then. Mailman Suite 3.1, release May 2016, was aimed to provide feature-parity with Mailman 2.x series and we think we _almost_ hit that goal.

Apart from no monthly password reminders, Mailman 3 has a much better Administrator/User interface, REST API for scripting, a really awesome archiver, support for multiple domains, support for external plugins, support for SSO/social login and so much more!

I love working on Mailman and would enjoy being able to do so full time for next 6-8 weeks. Mailman 3 is not very far from becoming the default version everyone would use, but it still needs some work to get there. I need help from you, the users of Mailman, to get us there. If you or your organization would like to move to (or, already moved to) Mailman 3, I urge you to donate[1] to us.

There are options to donate using Credit Card, Paypal, Bitcoin, Wire Transfer (of any currency), Check and money order.

If this campaign succeeds, here is a road map of what I intend to get done:

- Move Django apps(UI/Archiver) to Python 3 (or bilingual)
- Fork `mailman import` command to provide an upgrade path to Mailman 3.x from Mailman 2.x
- Fix MySQL compatibility in Core
- Changes in Postorius:
- Add support for missing options that are already exposed in Core’s API
- e.g. Support for setting templates
- Find the commonly used options that are not exposed in Core, add them to Core's API and add to Postorius
- Add Admin Dashboard project from GSoC 2014 (maybe?)
- Add better testing of container images and provide deployment instructions for Kubernetes & Docker Swarm
- Improve the container images to work with new micro-services architecture, to achieve scaling and redundancy in services.
- Administrator/User documentation for Postorius & Mailman
- (optional) Fork mmcli [3] project from Rajeev, fix if there is anything missing and add it as an additional command line tool to work with Mailman Core. Maybe pull it under Mailman umbrella.

Except for these, if there is something more important that is preventing the adoption of Mailman 3 from your end, we can discuss them. I'd like to mention that I have been working on Mailman 3 for quite some time now and I intend to implement every single item on the list. You donations would help it get done much sooner, hopefully in time for 3.2 release schedule (at PyCon US 2018).

You can follow the progress of this campaign here[2].

[1]: https://my.fsf.org/civicrm/contribute/transact?reset=1&id=22
[2]: https://wiki.list.org/x/17892025
[3]: https://github.com/rajeevs1992/mailmancli

thanks,
Abhilash Raj