[Mailman-Developers] bounce processing question and idea for future enhancements...

[Christopher G. Petrilli]

On Wed, Mar 03, 1999 at 07:55:23PM +0100, Harald Meland wrote:
> > 	This is the big one.  Does anyone besides me have a desire to see Mailman
> > support Listserv style "topics"?  Where topics are extracted from the
> > message subject and list messages are sent to a subset of the list that
> > "subscribes" to that particular topic?
> 
> I don't know ListServ -- what is the motivation for implementing
> something like this?  Wouldn't a separate mailing list for each
> "topic" and appropriate crossposting do the same?  Should there be
> topic-specific archives, or should the archive be topic-insensitive?

Well, I've run a few dozen LISTSERV installations, and I've never found
a use for it, honestly. :-) NOW, it was amazingly valuable back in the
days of BITNET (where LISTSERV originated), and the only use I can see
for it today is basically this:

A company has an "announcement" list, this list is subscribed to by
everyone interested, but there might be a couple of "topics":

	* Stuff of interest to everyone
	* New doodad announcements
	* New widget announcements
	* Celebrations of people being fired who deserved it :-)

One might argue that it's cleaner to have a single "announcement" list
and multiple "topics," but I'm not sure I've seen this being used
anywhere of late.  

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli                      ``Television is bubble-gum for
| petrilli@amber.org                          the mind.''-Frank Lloyd Wright