[Mailman-Developers] Questions in regard to the database operations

[Barry Warsaw]

Hi Emanuel,

On Jun 25, 2012, at 04:51 AM, Danci Emanuel wrote:

>First of all, how is the aliases set populated in time?

I'm guessing you mean the mailing list's "acceptable aliases", i.e. addresses
which are not the list's posting address, but will still be accepted if it
appears in a recipient header (To or CC) instead of being rejected as
"implicitly addressed".

At the lowest level, you adapt a mailing list into an IAcceptableAliasSet, and
then you .add() or .remove() addresses from that object.

Of course, all this is plumbed through the REST API.  A good description of
how this works is available here:

http://packages.python.org/mailman/src/mailman/rest/docs/configuration.html#acceptable-aliases

>Second of all, when a user is unsubscribed, is all the data related to
>him/her deleted (his/hers preferences, the info related to the address etc)
>?

In order to understand what happens when a user is unsubscribed, it's
important to review the data model.  Mailman has "addresses", "users", and
"members".  An address is essentially a known email address, which may be
verified or not, and which may or may not be linked to a user.  Users aren't
much more than a user id, but may have various other pieces of information
associated with it (e.g. a password).  Both addresses and users may have
"display names" and preferences.  Neither of these objects are directly
associated with a mailing list.

Addresses can be subscribed to mailing lists.  This "subscription" is
represented by member objects.  Or put another way, a member is an address
associated with a mailing list with a given role.  Because addresses can be
linked to users, this is how a user gets subscribed to a mailing list.  Note
that if a user has a "preferred address", the user record can be associated
with the mailing list as well, but this is a convenience shortcut.  Members
also have preferences.

So what happens when someone unsubscribes from a mailing list?  All that
happens is that the relevant member record gets deleted.  The member's
preferences also get deleted, but that's it.  Neither the address nor the user
is touched.

Hope that helps!
-Barry