[Mailman-Users] Efficient handling of cross-posting

[Brad Knowles]

On 1/28/08, Mikhail Teterin wrote:

>  Well, depending on the archival method, a message can appear in both, with
>  only a single copy of it being stored. This can be achived, for example,
>  using symbolic (or even hard) links.

We do not do a "single instance store" within the archiving system of 
Mailman, and I can pretty much guarantee you that we never will. 
That's not to say that this is necessarily a bad idea, but I think we 
have much, much more important issues to resolve -- and probably 
will, for the entire future history of Mailman.

>                                       Similarly, if a relational database is
>  employed, the same message can be referred to from multiple places.

We don't employ a relational database within Mailman, or the 
archiving system.  If you want to implement that kind of function 
according to the API and programming hooks that we provide, that 
would be completely and totally outside the scope of Mailman per se.

>  Hardlinks, for example, is how one IMAP-server (cyrus, I believe) stores
>  messages sent to multiple recipients.

We do not implement any kind of IMAP or other user mailbox service 
with Mailman.  If you want that, you should go somewhere else.

>  But I was referring to search-results only. Regardless of how the 
>messages are
>  stored, if I type the search string and select several of the mailing list
>  archives to search through, the same message may appear in my search results
>  more than once. That duplication should not happen -- I don't think, anyone
>  would disagree.

I *violently* disagree with your claim.  If a message was 
cross-posted to multiple mailing lists and indexed by Google, then 
Google will most certainly return multiple hits for the same message, 
and this is precisely what any proper search engine should do.

De-duplication at this level is absolutely the worst thing you could 
do -- at least by default, although this could potentially be an 
alternative that the search engine author could offer as an 
alternative.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at shub-internet.org>
LinkedIn Profile: <http://tinyurl.com/y8kpxu>