[Mailman-Developers] GSoC 2015: brainstorming ideas suitable for beginners?

[Barry Warsaw]

On Feb 27, 2015, at 01:02 PM, Ankush Sharma B.Tech. Electronics Engg, IIT(BHU), Varanasi (U.P.), INDIA wrote:

>A personalized mailing list will allow mailman users to send personalized
>emails to all the list members from a common email template.

Almost all the pieces are already there to support mail merging, at least as
a plugin.  There's quite a bit of functionality in place to allow for
pluggable MTA delivery methods.  Right now, there's only one.  Search
src/mailman/config/schema.cfg for the [mta]outgoing variable.

We also already do a bit of mixin class composition to implement various
aspects of the existing personalized delivery machinery.  The proper class is
chosen (based on the default [mta]outgoing value) from the value of
mlist.personalize.

To support mail merge, we'd need a little more flexibility in composing these
basic bits.  You'd like for individual mailing lists to be able to choose a
custom delivery mechanism from a set of site-defined choices, for example.

Then a plugin could define a new delivery class which does the database
lookups and the mail merge into the template at the point where the VERP'd
message is handed off to the upstream MTA.  You'd register this new delivery
class with the system and them mailing lists could opt into it.

Cheers,
-Barry
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