[Zope] Zope as a mail list server

[Jay, Dylan]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Everitt [mailto:Paul@digicool.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, June 02, 1999 00:30
> To: 'Jay, Dylan'; 'zope@zope.org'
> Subject: RE: [Zope] Zope as a mail list server
> 
> 
> 
> Dylan wrote:
> > Comments in the press release for "Zope portal" (whatever 
> > that is) seems to
> > indicate that mailing list type functionality might be 
> > available from inside
> > zope. Or at least the web archive part of a mail list. Is this true?
> 
> The portal toolkit will leverage the IMAP adapter to allow integration
> of email content into the portal.  A "Z Mailman", while on 
> the radar for
> this year, isn't on the radar for the first portal release.
>  
> > My current situation is as follows. I have a zope website 
> > using an odbc
> > database for a user base of around 500 or so users. I want to 
> > support both
> > discussion lists and annoucement style lists for my users. I 
> > want to be able
> > to view, search and submit mails from inside my zope website. 
> 
> Viewing and searching are awfully easy with the IMAP adapter.  You can
> do your searches on the IMAP server.
> 
> If, on the other hand, you'd like to integrate the email messages into
> Zope as Zope database entries and Zope Catalog entries, that 
> would take
> some noodling.  Not much, but a bit.
> 
> > I want users
> > to manage their subscription from both the website and from 
> > traditional
> > listserv like mail commands. I want to be able to store the 
> > user lists in
> > flexible way in my user database. I preferably want some 
> > flexibility on how
> > I store the archived messages.
> 
> Ahh, yes, you're definately talking something like Mailman.
>  
> > Its seems to me that all the list servers I'm looking at 
> > suffer from two
> > problems. One is lack of flexibility on the backend data 
> > storage. Another is
> > their intergration with existing web pages. Zope seems 
> > ideally placed to
> > bridge this gap. Is this planned? If so perhaps rather than 
> > hack togeather
> > some connection between an existing list server I should wait 
> > for the zope
> > version. 
> 
> Since we have Ken Manheimer, one of the key people from Mailman, here
> now we've talked a lot about the overlap between Mailman and 
> Zope.  Ken
> has done some experiments with putting a Zope front end on Mailman.
> 
> You could probably reduce the code in Mailman tenfold and increase its
> breadth ten fold by just doing a straight port.  OTOH, you could
> reinvent Mailman based on the Zope model of turning over control.

Its seems to me there are two ways to merge. One is to put in a an abstract
framework in place inside zope for managing long running servers and thus
make mailman a service of zope. The ability to have objects run for longer
than just the web request is something that is missing in zope (and has been
explained to me by others as being reasonably essential for a weblication).
Long running processes can accept input from a variaty of sources and
intergrate it into the repository or stream it off to other processes such
as applets in web pages. 
The other way is the one I dreamed up last night. You could seperate out the
membership storage code and the archive code in mailman. Then you could
override the these routines to interface instead to a private zope pages.
That way zope could be used to manage the data in the variaty of backends it
supports. I'm going to check the mailman code now to see how hard this is to
do. If its easy then I'll do it now as I'm running out of nice solutions. My
only other solution it seems is to buy listserv as that intergrates with
odbc. 

> Anyway, the imminent version of the portal toolkit will be 
> more like an
> archive manager.