[Zope] Zope Email (syndication)

[Dan L. Pierson]

Chris Withers writes:
 > I like these ideas a lot, but I'd prefer to see the low-level email
 > integration done seperately, so it can be used for other things.

What do you mean by low-level email integration?  If you mean actual
SMTP server stuff, I think this is a bad idea for two reasons:
performance and security.  The thought of trying to compete with qmail 
or even sendmail in either area is pretty scary.

If you mean that it should be possible to write any sort of email
client in Zope, I agree with you but it's not that big a deal.  Most
of the required support already exists in standard Python modules. There
already are some Linux/Unix email clients written in Python and
someone is reported to be working on a serious MAPI client that could
be used as an Outlook replacement (starts to drool, then remembers
that he's only a couple of months away from complete escape from
Outlook/Exchange hell anyway). 

It has been noted a number of times that the current MailHost can and
should be replaced with one based on the standard smtplib module.  A
patch is available somewhere and it's rumored to be in Zope 2.2.

 > My dream would be for Zope to pipe an email address to a specific
 > object/method without the need for any external mail servers or
 > scripts...

I think the current Python modules support this.  For one thing,
Mailman is written in Python and clearly does this kind of stuff.

 > ZMailman could then very easily be built on top of this. However, if
 > ZMailman is built, I suspect it'd be difficult to use the core
 > functionality to do something else. What is the email equivalent of
 > Medusa? And can we 'borrow' it in the same way?

I completely agree that a ZMailman should be layered such that other
products can use bits of its internals.  I just think that a lot of
that is already done in the standard Python distribution.

Dan Pierson