[Mailman-Developers] Mailman roadmap

[Barry Warsaw]

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It's catch up on email day!

On Jul 9, 2007, at 9:35 AM, Ian Eiloart wrote:

> WRT 3.0, for enterprise and education purposes, it's important to  
> be able
> to hook into existing authentication and authorisation mechanisms.  
> For us,
> that means LDAP - at least for authentication. On the other hand,  
> we also
> have external people using our lists, so we need to be able to  
> either put
> them into an SQL database which will work in conjunction with LDAP,  
> or to
> add a separate LDAP tree for them, or something similar.

So, my standard answer to this will be, Mailman will provide  
interfaces for these things and ensure that the application is  
written to only ask these questions through the interface.  It will  
be easy to plug in different backends, so if someone were to write an  
LDAP or hybrid backend, Mailman would work with it.  This will be  
much easier than the current hacks required for Mailman 2.1.  The  
goal would be to support such plugins through Python eggs, so that  
such extensions are easy to install and enable.

> Something that I've mentioned before, is the importance of preventing
> collateral spam. So, I'd like to be able to have my MTA ask Mailman  
> whether
> a particular email address is permitted to post to a particular  
> list, at
> SMTP time. I'm using Exim, which could call an external python  
> script, but
> I'd rather be able to issue an SMTP callout to a running daemon, for
> efficiency. The callout would be executed after each "RCPT TO".

Yes, you'll have this capability.  Really, you could do it now with a  
bit of Python coding.  I'm currently jonesing for a RESTful interface  
to Mailman 3 for controlling it, asking it questions, etc., which of  
course the site-administrator would have to enable.  The only other  
viable alternatives I see are XMLRPC, or the current 'write some  
custom Python script' approach.

- -Barry

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