[Mailman-Developers] Discussion about Mailman plugins(GSOC 2015)

[Prakash kumar]

I want to implement plugin with features:-

   1. Using regex for filtering texts ( personal information eg: phone
   number, address ).
   2. Checking type of files that can be attached to the mails. For eg:
   .exe not allowed.
   3. If there are multiple attachments in the email

If (multiple attachments) then
> for each attachment
>  if(not appropriate) then
>  discard
> notify sender that this part is removed from email body and why
> else
> continue


 Is it big enough for a gsoc proposal?

What else I can add to it?




On Thu, Mar 5, 2015 at 7:16 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull <stephen at xemacs.org>
wrote:

> Please keep traffic on-list, unless it's security-related or truly
> personal.  Replying to list.
>
> Prakash kumar writes:
>
>  >  > What does a "plugin" give that improves on this process?
>  >
>  > The only problem that I find is, we need to implement a framework for
>  > loading, unloading and communication of plugins.
>
> We have such a framework already, and since the only person who will
> be using it is the site admin (see below), I really don't see why the
> command-line-based download-copy-configure process is excessively
> burdensome.
>
>  > Loading and unloading plugins are better than going to code and making
>  > changes for every requirement.
>
> Somebody has to write the code.  Once it's written, you just copy the
> module into place, and no code needs to be written.
>
>  > It will also help new developers to write plugins without actually
>  > understanding the complex coding of mailman.
>
> I can't imagine an interesting plugin that requires no understanding
> of Mailman internals.  Theming web interfaces, sure, but that's not
> part of Mailman core anymore, that would for Postorius or HyperKitty
> or some other application.  What kind of thing are you thinking about?
> Is it really appropriate for a mailing list (vs a blog or web forum)?
>
>  > I think it will be better if we can give the users
>
> What users?  See next comments.
>
>  > ability to load and unload plugins without touching the source code
>
> We already have that, for values of "user" == site admin.  With a
> prewritten plugin (handler or rule), the only Python you need to know
> is the syntax of Python lists and strings, and maybe not even that.
>
>  > means from the web ui like in wordpress.
>
> I think this is very unlikely to happen.  No sane site admin would
> enable such a feature in Mailman as currently implemented, because
> once you have a Python module, you have access to pretty much
> everything inside of Mailman.  For example, you could write a plugin
> that looks for private or no-archive lists, saves a month of posts
> to disk, and then spews the lot to Twitter (after checking the
> language and spewing to Weibo instead for Chinese).
>
> The only thing I can think of would be nice to have, maybe the site
> admin could install the handlers/rules manually as now, but add a
> feature to Postorius to allow manipulation of the pipeline from the
> web UI so that handlers or rules could be enabled selectively for
> individual lists.  Again I'm not sure that a sane site admin would
> allow this from the web UI, because manipulating the pipeline or rules
> can have a large impact on performance and correctness of behavior.
> If a poorly ordered pipeline caused a list to go rogue, that could
> affect the reputation of the whole site.
>
>
>