[Mailman-Developers] OpenPGP Mailman integration discussion [was: Re: GSoc - Requirement from Mentor to complete the project]

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Daniel Kahn Gillmor writes:

 > Is implementing this option something that would be part of the first
 > phase of the work, or should it be part of a later phase?

He can implement it whenever he wants :-), but if I were his GSoC
mentor, he'd be getting paid for something else (ie, the pure
authentication part).  Barry and Wacky think similarly I believe.

 > Maybe the mailman devs can answer this question: does mailman already do
 > something like this to check against message-ids that have already been
 > delivered to prevent duplicate delivery?

I don't recall for sure but I don't think so.  I tend to think it's
too much effort.  We do worry about routing cycles and handle that
with X-Been-Seen fields.  Message-IDs themselves are not very useful;
in my own experience repeated message IDs are invariably due to
Post-and-Mail issues (which we deal with post-by-post by checking the
NoDupes flag on any addressees who appear in the list).  Duplicate
originals tend to be due to "keyboard bounce" (ie, for some reason the
user resends within a number of seconds) or moderation delays -- in
both cases usually they end up with different Message-IDs.

 > Thanks, I really appreciate your engagement with these questions.  There
 > are a lot of finicky details to keep track of, and you're coming up to
 > speed fast on questions that most people haven't thought about at all.
 > Keep it up!

+1 !

Also, Abhilash, I believe it would be very helpful to you later to
blog about these conversations now.[1]  Your blog entries should not be
fire-and-forget; you should have separate entries for different topics
and go back and update entries as you learn more.  It might also be
helpful to keep links to the mm-dev archive posts as references in
your blog.  (I haven't actually practiced that last myself, but it
seems plausible.)

It *will* seem like too much effort at first, but (1) people forget
things unbelievably fast, and (2) you'll get better at it quickly.

STeve


Footnotes: 
[1]  Maybe you already have, if so, my apologies.  I'll go check
later. :-)