inbox.sourceware.org experiment

[Frank Ch. Eigler]

Hi -

> [...]
> > Yes, understood that the extra indexing can do extra searches.  My
> > question was about utility/need for this.
> 
> The use seems obvious to me for anybody using the web based archives
> to generate tailored message/mbox results, specifically date ranged
> searches seem pretty mandatory since otherwise you essentially just
> need to keep clicking, next, next, next.

I was under the impression that your main interest in p-i was the easy
addressability and availability of raw emails, for use such as with
git-am.  Are there other users pining for this kind of thing?

> But also to get specific messages based on author or subject. On
> specific use case for public-inbox is to not have to be subscribed
> to a list to read it [...]

You are expecting people to use the xapian query language for this
stuff?  Mailman offers that style of click-click browsing already.


> [...]
> So this is before mailman sees the message, so we do need to do a
> spam-check.

No, postfix already spam checks everything upon receipt, before delivery.

> And I think postfix sets ORIGINAL_RECIPIENT already, we just need to
> make sure it is one of the addresses for a list in the config.

This shouldn't be something that we need to write code to do, if it needs
to be done at all.


> But what generates /etc/mailman/aliases itself?  Can we hook into that
> to trigger generation of this aliases-inbox file? Otherwise if we add
> a new mailman list it won't work.

It must be some mailman administrative script.  Just crontab another
one.

> And do we need to update/regenerate
> /etc/aliases.db and/or /etc/mailman/aliases.db ?

The proposal is to not touch /etc/aliases* NOR /etc/mailman/aliases*.
The proposal is to generate a new file like
/etc/postfix/mailman-inbox-aliases from /etc/mailman/aliases.  That
new file would be the one postfix would read.  It could be texthash:
rather than hash: so postmap would not even be necessary for updates.
That depends on whether the relevant alias-expansion postfix process
is short- or long-lived.


- FChE