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

[J C Lawrence]

On 03 Mar 1999 19:55:23 +0100 
Harald Meland<Harald.Meland@usit.uio.no> wrote:

> [Jeff Hahn]
>> 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?

> To be frank, this whole idea seems rather hackish to me, though I
> might feel better about it if you explain _why_ you have a need for
> it.

A long long time ago in a computing universe utterly unrelated to
Linux (or MS for that matter) I used list software which allowed users
to define patterns (lists of keywords and simple wildcards) with the
result that they would only be sent messages which matched the defined
expressions __plus__ (and this was the cool bit) N messages in that
thread after a match (where N was of course configurable.  Further
useful intelligence had the list send M further posts of threads if
the subscriber posted to that thread (overriding pattern matching).

This allowed filtering at the server end, and was incredibly useful
for high traffic lists (err, "forums" in that context).

-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
----------(*)                            Internet: coder@kanga.nu
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...