[Mailman-Developers] Parsing and Rendering rfc2822

[Brad Knowles]

Ethan quoted John Dennis:

>> It's not at all clear to me that mailman should be responsible for
>> archiving.
>
> While I am somewhat in agreement, the current situation is that
> archiving comes bundled with mailman and represents a significant
> weakness in its current web UI. Not doing anything about the web UI
> presented by the archives would, in my mind, represent a substantial
> failing.

One of the reasons I switched from Majordomo to Mailman was because of the
better integration of the web control and archive system, so I at least
partially agree with you.

>> Archiving and MLM (Mailing List Manager) functionality can be
>> orthogonal to each other.
>
> I can imagine - but have never used - a mailing list where access to
> past emails is 'orthogonal' to the use of the mailing list.

Majordomo, older versions of Mailman, as just two examples of many.

In fact, most MLMs don't necessarily have integrated archive components. 
And there are plenty of people who don't care for Pipermail and instead
integrate a third-party archive system into Mailman, in accordance with
the instructions that we provide in the FAQ Wizard.


I am not at all opposed to improving or replacing pipermail with something
else that is integrated into Mailman, but we need to make sure we don't
lose sight of these other archive systems, and that we don't do anything
that would make it more difficult to use them.

> It is probably just a sign that I haven't explored the extant solutions
> sufficiently, but I have seen no sign that there are a variety of
> high-quality archiving solutions out there.

There are at least a couple of alternatives mentioned in the FAQ Wizard,
and John has clearly found at least one more.  I'm sure he can tell you
the search process he used to find all the others, so that you can take a
look at all the ones he found and then see if there are any others you can
discover on top of that.

But this is a pretty big undertaking.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

  LOPSA member since December 2005.  See <http://www.lopsa.org/>.