[Mailman-developers] List entry indexing

[Ken Manheimer]

On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Robin Friedrich wrote:

> In a prior round of email, Ken mentioned that we would need to key the
> mail list entries to something other than the person's actual email
> address in order to implement the flexible user information editing
> capability of the web (changing one's sendto address, etc.). I agree
> that this is needed, sooner or later. Since I haven't seen the code yet,
> how difficult is it to just make a unique key for each subscriber and
> key the database off that with address as just one value?

Actually, that's not what i meant to imply.  In a maillist system where
users have "accounts" - ie some kind of identity which they can control
and which has resources associated with it - it seems to me that the
reception email address is precisely the right characteristic for
identifying that account.  It is only thing you really know with any
assurance *at all* about the user.  Everything else is on their say so. 

To understand this perspective, consider that any user can hit the "send
me my password" button for any account.  The important thing is that the
password gets sent to the email address for the account, not some
arbitrary address of the user's choosing.  The password and the only
invariant of the account are tightly coupled.  We do *not* want to allow
any subscriber to specify different addresses for delivery of their
password and delivery of their subsciption postings - the would allow
pranksters and other malicious folk to subscribe and inflict unwanted
mail from our lists on arbitrary people. 

No, i think it's important to keep the email address as the account
identifier, and not let the user change that within the same account.
The nice thing mailman offers is change of anything else - digest or
non-digest, concealment, etc.

> I hope I'm not using this list too soon.

I don't think so.  And btw, i'm hoping to finish packaging up my full
set of patches to release within an hour or two - i'll be posting to
both lists when it's ready...

Ken