Re: Next steps for ezmlm-idx

At 7:38 PM 9/11/08, Bruce Guenter wrote:
>Actually, providing a nice web interface for subscribers to manage their
>subscription(s) is a higher immediate priority in my mind than an
>interface for managers, although both are important.  Simply put, there
>are always going to be more subscribers than managers (though it is the
>list managers that will decide what software to use).

If the subscribers are going to get a nice web interface, maybe they 
should have more options to manage than just subscribe/unsubscribe. 
One option that comes to mind would be to allow digest subscribers to 
choose which form of the digest they get, instead of having a single 
option for the entire list.

Another option subscribers sometimes ask about is the ability to set 
their subscription to "nomail" to temporarily stop getting list 
messages.  Some other mailing list software provides this option. 
Personally, I'm not sure it's really such a big deal.  To me, it 
seems just as easy to unsubscribe and resubscribe as to turn mail 
delivery off and on while remaining subscribed.  Also, the subscriber 
list may get cluttered with zombies who switched off mail delivery 
years ago and then forgot about it.  But some people seem to like 
having that option.

One option I would like as a manager is the ability to define a list 
of users whose messages should be moderated, while messages from 
other users would be posted immediately.  If I understand ezmlm-gate 
correctly, this function would simply be the reverse of the way it 
operates now.  From the manpage:

>ezmlm-gate checks if SENDER is in it least one of the subscriber 
>lists with base directory dir/modsubdir1, dir/modsubdir2, etc. If it 
>is, the message is posted via ezmlm-send to the list in dir. If not, 
>the message is sent for moderation via ezmlm-store. The named 
>subscriber list directories must be either relative to dir or fall 
>within dir.

So it would be nice to have a flag added to ezmlm-gate to tell it to 
switch this function, and post the message if SENDER is NOT in the 
specified list.

I would prefer for error messages from ezmlm to be sent as new 
messages with customizable content instead of bounce messages from 
MAILER-DAEMON in qmail's bounce format.  I realize that this might 
not be possible without a major change to ezmlm architecture ... but 
as long as we're dreaming...