Mailing Lists
Author: Aaron Stone
Date: Feb 7, 2007
Material collected from several other pages previously on the wiki.
Previous Ideas
- Expose mailing list archives as a mailbox, perhaps under some hierarchy like #Lists.
- Respond to mailing list commands in-process.
- Leverage groups for distribution lists.
Feasibility
This is not going to happen. Go set up Mailman, look at the variety of options it offers, the privacy features, storm controls, moderation system, and so on. There's no reason to reimplement so much good work. And if you have an opinion about how lists should be run, and therefore feel that Mailman has too many options, consider that someone else may have a different opinion of how lists should run.
What can be done?
Connecting DBMail to Mailman is clumsy, at best. You have to put something like 5-8 entries into the aliases table for each mailing list. Worse yet, Mailman is then run as the DBMail user – on my systems I've had to write a setuid/setgid double wrapper script that changes to Mailman's uid/gid then runs the real Mailman wrapper wrapper. Too many aliases and too many wrappers! I think we can make this a lot cleaner. I'm not sure how, but it can be done! 
wow