[Zope] Mailboxer vs. Mailman?

[Holger Blasum]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2002 at 04:17:27PM -0400, Philip Glaser wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I need to integrate listserv functionality into a Zope site I am developing.
> I am considering using either mailman
> (http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html) or mailboxer
> (http://www.zope.org/Members/mjablonski/MailBoxer). It seems to me that
> mailboxer has the obvious advantage of directly integrating with Zope for
> the purpose of customization, and it appears to be at a mature and stable
> release level. Have folks had good experiences with mailboxer? On the other
> hand, what is it like integrating mailman into a Zope site?

Just for the record, here's a dirty hack I (ignorant of MailBoxer) did for a 
small project (vpn/intranet):

- installed mailman 2.0, customized away all of the password reminder
  etc options, removed cgi interface, edited 'subscription.txt'
- added zope user to 'list' group, ran zope not as root but via 'su' so 
  that it really gets the group permissions by PAM, changed group write
  permissions for the mailman data, removed a 'umask(700)' in 'MailList.py'
- wrote a 'subscribe(user,list)' external method that just says 
  posix.system ("echo " + user + " | /usr/sbin/add_members  -n - " + list)
  (including a sanity regex check on the user provided email address)
- changed appearance of pipermail archive links in 'HyperArch.py', 
  mounted mailman archives via 'LocalFS' into zope
- (CMF) adapted 'portal_memberdata' and 'personalization' skin to allow
  subscription via zope (list membership is treated as boolean for each
  list)

More elegant approaches do exist (ZMailman, CMFMailIn) but I do not know to 
what extent they are used. Also because mailman 2.0 may be regarded as
superseded by version 2.1 I would not really recommend the above 
approach (though it works) and would also be myself be very interested 
in how other persons solved that task. Anyway next time, I think I
should give MailBoxer a try ;-)

-- 
Holger Blasum