[Plone-NGOs] mailing list integration

Paul Roeland paul.roeland at milieudefensie.nl
Mon Nov 20 10:03:58 UTC 2006


(Renaming the thread from the Christian Aid thingie)

Rob Miller wrote:

> MailBoxer does use the ZODB for mail message storage, yes.  and listen,
> while actually faster and more scalable than MailBoxer, from our initial
> testing, does use MailBoxer, and thus stored the messages in the ZODB.
> 

<snip for brevity>

> alec won me over with his thorough investigation of the various
> solutions and options, and i think we've made good choices.  it is our
> intent to support listen being able to scale; we hope to eventually have
> many thousands of listen-based mailing lists hosted on openplans.org,
> and hopefully at least a few of these will likely have many thousands of
> users.  that being said, we're working on a lot of software, and while
> we know that listen needs some attention, it's not at the top of our
> priority queue right now.
> 

That makes me all the more optimistic that we should get an integration
of Sympa and Plone going, using Listen as the web-archive. I don't doubt
that the ZODB is a good place for a webarchive; I just sincerely doubt
that Zope can/should handle things like bounce management for large
lists. (We regularly send mailings to respondents of web-forms, which
have about a 20-30% bounce rate at the best of time...)

Luckily, in Sympa, web-archives are *completely* separated from the main
mailinglist engine itself. So far separated, in fact, that Sympa keeps
two copies of every message, one for it's own archive and one for it's
web-archive. The web-archive runs as a separate process (WWSympa), which
should be easy to rip out/adapt.
Plus, the newest versions of  Sympa have infrastructure in place whereby
authorisation to it's lists can be 'delegated' to a CMS like Plone. In
other words, it will 'trust' your Plonesite to have authenticated a
user, if it presents the right certificate. That should make it far
easier to allow sending authenticated messages from Plone/Listen.

Thus, it would seem possible to offload all the frightening and boring
stuff of mailinglist management to Sympa (bounce management, load
balancing between SMTP gateways, sending out tons of mail), and do the
human-facing stuff in Plone.
Will try to investigate more.

Paul Roeland
Friends of the Earth Netherlands




More information about the NGO mailing list