[Mailman-Developers] hooking mailman into bbs forum

[Steel City Phantom]

i am in the planning stages of building a knowledge storage system.  i 
have decided to organize the data and the discussions in a forum type 
layout and i want an email interaction with the PHP pages on the forum.  
so my question is this, does anyone know of any effort to port the 
message archive systems in mailman to MySQL?  the reason i want to use 
mailman is i have used it in the past for various lists and really like 
its speed and stability.  when it comes to a distribution list, i really 
don't want to reinvent the wheel.  i don't want my web server or my 
JBoss server to have to deal with emailing people every day.  i want 
that to be a third server sitting in the network handling that task.

the plan i have been kicking around is my PHP and JBoss systems would 
automatically create a mailman list for every forum subject.  for the 
users, i will create another interface where they can opt to be emailed 
all the discussions that happen in the forum.  when they opt in, the 
scripts will create a user for that person in the list.  The PHP 
interface will be set up so when someone goes into the interface to post 
a topic or reply, it will save it to the database and send a copy to the 
mailman list.  that email that is sent to mailman will have hidden 
fields in the HTML that will be used if the person replys to the email 
in order to track the threading and such in the database.

up to this point, its easy enough, now the hard part.

if someone replys to the email they receive from mailman, how to i get 
mailman to either post the reply into the mysql database, or another 
option will be send my JBoss servlet the email formatted into some kind 
of xml that the JBoss can use to post into the forum.

if anyone can point me into a direction to do this, it would help me a 
lot.  i just downloaded 2.1.5 and am starting to find my way around the 
code, but that will take a while.

thanks
willie