[Mailman-Developers] RE: [ZMailman] Goals and next steps?

[Barry A. Warsaw]

>>>>> "TT" == Trevor Toenjes <zope@toenjes.com> writes:

    TT> My wishes:
    TT> A.  I would like to use Zmailman as an MTA from Zope.

    TT> So I would like to deliver a payload of Zope multi-part mime
    TT> content to zMailman and assign it to a list for delivery.

This will be easy in MM2.1.  Using the email package, you compose the
MIME subparts into a Message object, then you use Mailman's Post.py
module to get the message into the incoming queue.  MM's incoming
queue runner then picks it up and does the normal moderate-and-munge
pipeline processing on the message, eventually sending it to the
sink queues -- outgoing, archiver, digester, news -- as appropriate.

Nothing too Zope specific here.

    TT> Then I would like to get to the bounce data, etc, from Zope.

I'm not sure what that means.  Do you mean you want the user-specific
bounce statistics to be stored in Zope?  That will be doable when I
integrate the bounce stats into the MemberAdaptor API (which I will do
this week as part of the bounce processing overhaul).

    TT> And perform logic on the list, like automatically removing
    TT> names from the list that are bounced after 48 hours.  So, we
    TT> should allow for Mailman to reside on its own server for
    TT> high-volume cases.

All doable in MM2.1 because it will do all the member-specific data
access and modifications through the MemberAdaptor.

    TT> B.  I would also like to get at and improve Mailman's
    TT> validation capability.

None of this is Zope specific BTW.

    TT> Zmailman should have 3 options to validate an email address.
    TT> 1.  Syntax -- Parses the address to ensure legal syntax Less
    TT> than one millisecond.

Right.  We do some of this, but could/should be using Python's RFC
2822 address parser as well.
    
    TT> 2.  DNS -- All of the above, plus makes
    TT> sure the domain exists and has an address for receiving email
    TT> (as specified by MX or A records) A second or two. Default
    TT> timeout is 10 seconds.

Doable, although not curently done.
    
    TT> 3.  SMTP -- All of the above, plus
    TT> contacts the domain's mail server and inquires about the
    TT> recipient Tens of seconds. Default timeout is 60 seconds.
    TT> Combined with the DNS timeout, this makes a worst case of 70
    TT> seconds.

Harder, because you are not at all guaranteed that the SMTP server
provides validation services (i.e. VRFY).  The web page you reference
even points this out.

Note that all this could be done fairly easily in Python and hooked
into the Utils.ValidateEmail() function in Mailman.  It probably
/should/ be done for MM2.1.  Note further though that just because an
email address is RFC 822 valid doesn't necessarily mean we want to
support them in Mailman.  First off, it should be RFC 2822 compliant.
Second off, does Mailman really need to accept UUCP addresses these
days?

    | http://www.hexillion.com/docs/guides/HexValidEmail/concepts/
    | good reference

Interest, thanks!

-Barry