[Mailman-Users] mail distro, newsgroup, or both?

[Brad Knowles]

bergenpeak at comcast.net wrote:

> I'd like the mail distro to be "open" meaning one shouldn't have to 
> subscribe to send to the distro.

That guarantees that the spammers will hit it heavily, once they find out 
about it.

>                                   I'm thinking the mail distro would 
> have no receipients other than the archive.  It's sort of like a 
> newsgroup but where info could be added to the "newgroup" (archive) via 
> e-mail.

If you're only going to use it for archiving purposes, it sounds to me more 
like you want a newsgroup than a mailing list.

> Is there an easy way to index and search over one or more mailman distros?

Mailman distros?  There is no such thing.

Do you mean Mailman mailing lists?  The interface is exposed to third-party 
archivers, such as mhonarc, and there are other third-party index/search 
tools that also can be relatively easily integrated.  Search the FAQ Wizard 
for more info on that subject.

> I'm not sure how to address "followups".  In a newsgroup paradigm, 
> replying to a post brings that thread to the top of the newsgroups.  I 
> don't think that's the cases with mailman and threads (though I could be 
> wrong).

If you're doing an archive-only mailing list, there would be no such thing 
as followups, or message threading, since no one would be receiving a copy 
of the messages by mail and they wouldn't have access to any of the headers 
that are used to build threads, etc....

The best you could do would be to have people manually copy relevant 
portions of a message from the archives into a new message and then post 
that to the same list, and hope that they also remember to keep the same 
subject.


You're basically destroying much of the value of the archives of a proper 
mailing list, because you've got an input to the process but no normal outputs.

-- 
Brad Knowles <brad at python.org>
Member of the Python.org Postmaster Team & Co-Moderator of the
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