[Mailman-Developers] mailman and the web

[Jerry Asher]

Thanks for responding.  Let me apologize "the new kid" has arrived, and 
travel reservations, etc. has turned this into a six hour, reply in dire 
need of editing.....

    JA> Currently the ACS system is such that visitors can request
>     JA> that follow up answers be sent to them, which the ACS
>     JA> implements by creating hundreds of individual emails and
>     JA> mailing them out.
>
>How would you organize it otherwise?

I didn't mean to imply that I would *organize* it differently (although I 
like your ideas about topic ids that you mention later on).  I was trying 
to suggest I would like to *implement* it differently.  Currently, the ACS 
bboard software, (uh, I believe) sends a new email to each 
individual.  Some have suggested that this in unnecessarily inefficient, 
that a smarter mailer (that might be found in a mailing list) might batch 
up the emails more efficiently.  Is that true?  Does mailman accomplish this?

But also, the ACS bboard software doesn't do anything special with the 
headers that one *is supposed* to do for mailing lists.  For instance, you 
mention a "precedence: bulk" header to ward off properly configured 
vacation programs.  The ACS bboard doesn't do that, yet.  So unifying the 
ACS bboard with a maillist list manager that already implements proper 
header creation benefits the ACS wonderfully.

>    |   1  detecting/catching vacation messages
>
>Vacation messages are never supposed to be sent to messages with
>"Precedence: bulk" headers.  I think this is a rather ad-hoc
>`standard' and a lot of vacation programs just don't conform.  For
>those buggy programs, knowing who they actually send the vacation
>messages to is impossible.  Maybe it's Reply-to:/From: but sometimes
>it's Sender: or even Errors-To:.  Mailman sets the latter to the
>-admin address, so at least there's a hope that even for broken
>vacation progs, the original sender won't get completely spammed.

Thanks for this information, the ACS bboard isn't setting precedence 
errors-to, sender, or anything.

>OTOH, I'm not sure there's much Mailman can do.  Few even broken
>vacation progs will send their responses to the list (thank goodness),
>and if it doesn't go through Mailman, it obviously can't detect or
>catch it.

I think the plan (initally) would be for all mail and replies to go through 
Mailman just so the ACS  can benefit from Mailman's having done this 
already, and Mailman's developers continuing interest in improving, or 
following new standards, etc.

>Do you mean email->bbs?  That can theoretically be possible using the
>same mechanism that email->news or email->archive works: you write a
>Handlers/ module to inject the message into the bbs.  Your handler
>module will contain a process() function that takes a mailing list, a
>message, and a Python dictionary containing message metadata.  Then it
>Does Whatever It Wants with this information and returns None.  With
>an appropriate API for injection into the bbs, the DWIW part shouldn't
>be hard.

That sounds good.  Pardon my Mailman/Python ignorance, is there truly a 
procedure literally called email->bbs, or does this describe a "path" that 
mail can take?

How do I do the reverse?  bbs->email?  (Just send an email to the list?)

How might I encode a piece of bbs data into an email such that replies to 
the email will carry that piece of data back?  (that is, the specific 
thread/topic_id that the bbs should put the message into).  I realize I can 
do this by mangling the subject line for example:

"Re: [thread: 2FC24] Mrs. Field's Recipes",

but is there a more subtle/correct way to do this?  Perhaps by adding a 
header?  Or by mangling the reply-to address?

Qmail has wonderful behavior that supports my mangling of the reply-to 
address.  You can send a message to me at jerry@hollyjerry.org, or 
jerry-junk@hollyjerry.org, or jerry-webvan@ or you can put anything after 
the hyphen.  It will get to me all the same, OR I can set up qmail in a 
procmail like fashion to pass the message to a script which can filter the 
messages based on the data after the hyphen.  So one way to encode the bbs 
thread data is to set the reply to "bboard-thread-2FC24@mybboard.com".

I found a recent copy of RFC 2076 that explains some of these headers, but 
can you point me to some documents that specifically what maillists are 
supposed to do including these ad-hoc standards?  Last night I was at the 
bookstore and flipped through an O'Reilly text: "Programming Email" - that 
sure didn't contain anything helpful.

What specifies the behavior of a mail user agent in reply?  If I send a 
header, will the user agent include that header in a reply?

Specifically, it appears I might encode some bboard message threading 
information in an X-URI, X-URL, or Content-Alternative headers.  "Should" a 
reply to a message containing those headers contain those headers?  From 
your answer regarding X-BeenThere, it sounds as though a "normal" reply 
should not include these headers....

Thanks,

Jerry
=====================================================
Jerry Asher                       jerry@hollyjerry.org
1678 Shattuck Avenue Suite 161    Tel: (510) 549-2980
Berkeley, CA 94709                Fax: (877) 311-8688