[Mailman-Users] setting up the mailing list

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Grant Taylor writes:

 > > What would one use to maintain a contact list, with more than just 
 > > name and email address?

 > However this is out side the scope of Mailman and as such Mailman will 
 > likely never store much more than it is.

Mailman itself will not, but one goal of MM3 is to provide a standard
connector architecture for backend databases which supply at least a
name and email address but probably do a lot more than that.

People who are interested in this feature should look at the MM3 stuff
on the wiki and the MM3 code and documentation, then ask Barry what
his plans are.  It should not be hard to add further elements to
web-based forms (for one example) that feed names and addresses to
such a connector.  Then Mailman itself would ignore that additional
information (absent local extensions), merely providing a single
communication channel for list managers to access the backend
database.  Most of the effort would no doubt go to providing sane
error messages in the case where the backend's schema doesn't support
the additional fields, and stuff like that.