Anyone interested in cosponsoring work on a tighter integration of Plone and Mailman?

[Paul Roeland]

Rob Miller wrote:
> 
> while i agree that there will be a number of advantages to using a more 
> developed mailing list solution that listen, i don't actually agree that 
> there is something inherently wrong w/ using listen for large lists and 
> heavy traffic.  the ZODB is a great store, it scales very well, it's 
> nice and indexable.
> 
> most Plone objects are AT based, and are very heavy and very slow.  the 
> listen objects are very light, so they serialize and deserialize very 
> quickly, and i don't really foresee any problems with big lists.  you'll 
> definitely want to use MaildropHost to take the mail delivery out of the 
> Zope process, however.

Good to hear this, and maybe there are ways we could expand and/or 
improve listen. My main concerns about listen, and the strong points of 
Sympa, do not revolve around using the ZODB for storage, however. I'm 
quite confident the ZODB could handle things like archives while doing 
backflips.
It mainly has to do with sending performance:

- Sympa has smart mechanisms to avoid overfeeding mailservers, and 
combining addresses from the same domain. That is vital if your 
listmembers number around hundredthousand or more per list. As far as I 
know, MaildropHost is not that advanced.

- bounce management is also a big issue if around 30% of a large 
mailshot bounces, which is not uncommon.

- Sympa also has features for "dynamic" lists, where you basically send 
out an email to all addresses satisfying an LDAP and/or SQL query. Maybe 
that could be integrated into listen. Quite often, the addresses come 
out of external sources like CRM systems, data entry bureaus, etcetera. 
So a 'loose' coupling, where you can easily integrate addresses from 
external sources but also throw them away after use, is desirable.


> 
> listen is certainly not as developed or road-tested as Sympa, nor does 
> it have as large a user community, so i can understand if folks choose 
> the more tested platform.  but saying that it's inherently a poor choice 
> for large lists and heavy traffic is uninformed FUD, IMO.
> 

Don't get me wrong, listen is nice. Plus it has a friendly user 
interface, whereas the Sympa webinterface is basically an excercise in 
user hostility. It's just that they've got the scaling issues very well 
nailed down, especially in the 'backend' services like actually SMTP'ing 
and dealing with bounces.

So maybe we could think along the lines of using Sympa as a supercharged 
replacement for MaildropHost, and leave the archiving and user interface 
to listen.


Paul Roeland
Friends of the Earth Netherlands