[Mailman-Developers] Mailman archive and MIME

[Andrew M. Kuchling]

Barry A. Warsaw writes:
>I'd love it if Pipermail could handle MIME, but I gather that Andrew
>isn't very interested in working on Pipermail anymore.  Unfortunately
>I probably do not have the time to hack on this either.  But if

	The original motivation for writing Pipermail was because
Hypermail was unmaintained at the time; it hadn't been updated since
1995.  Things have changed now; a group of people has taken over
Hypermail maintenance (http://www.landfield.com/hypermail/), there are
various other programs such as MHonArc around, and e-mail archives are
getting much fancier (look at egroups.com for an example).  The other
archivers are advancing faster on features because I don't really have
time to hack on Mailman; for example, I think the current Hypermail
version handles MIME-encoded messages.

	In short, I think the way of the future is to keep the
existing Pipermail archive for the 70% of users with relatively simple
needs, and provide a way to hook into arbitrary archivers for those
users who need something more powerful.

-- 
A.M. Kuchling			http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/
    "I thought you could foretell the future?"
    "I don't need to know the future. When the future's over, then it's me..."
    -- Orpheus and Death, in SANDMAN: "The Song of Orpheus"