Mailing Lists in im2000

Georg Lehner

October 23, 2002

Abstract

I felt, that it was necesary to clear some concepts of mailing list delivery, to find out about the functionality required by im2000 message stores and collectors. This document is esentially a copy of a post to the im2000 mailing list, where some categories are enumerated. Eventually there will be implementation for some of the concepts which go together with my Qmail based im2000 message post and store concept.

Definitions:

list-manager: synonym for the software and also for a Recipient Identifier asociated with a list.
Subscriber: Recipient Identifier registered in a database asociated with list membership
Reader: Recipient Identifier collecting a message from a list
Moderator: Recipient Identifier registered in a database containing the moderators of the list.

Mailing list categories

archive: the list-manager software gets notified by posters and collects their mail
without archive: the list-manager gets notified by posters and stores the notification as messages. Readers recur to the posters `"out`"-box to collect the message.

news-like: messages have just an expire date.
subscribed-like: (sorry for that dumb name), messages are expired, when all subscribers notifications have expired.

closed posting: I'll need to be registered as an allowed notifier to be able to notify the list-manager.
open posting: any notification is accepted by the list manager. Readers decide which message to skip and which to collect (spam, unwanted members postings, etc.)

closed reading: Only subscribers are notified (and thus authorized).
open reading: nobody is notified, anybody is authorized to collect messages.

active notification: notifications are sent to subscribers when a message is posted.
polled: Readers collect messages on an individual schedule.

active subscription: a notification to the subscriber is solicited when a message is posted.
passive subscription: notification to the subscriber is supressed.

These two deserve some explication. While active notification always sends a notification to all members of the list, active/passive subscription let the subscriber decide, wether she/he want to be notified about new mails on the list or not.

moderated: the list Recpient Identifier is an alias to a list containing the moderators as subscribers. Moderators are aliases to the `"real`" Recipient Identifiers of the corresponding persons. The list-manager only accepts notifications from the moderators.
(Don't bite me on this one).
Notes:

Personally I do not expect, there'd be just ONE mailing list software, but various diferent agents which you plug together at your individual needs , like it's done with djbdns' Name Service, or any other unix-toolbox plumbed together to form a new application.

Jorge.Lehner@gmx.net