# The Mailman TODO list

## Categories:

- Bugs
- Documentation
- General Web UI
- List Admin UI
- List Member UI
- Site Administrator's UI
- Email Handling
- Mailcmd interface
- Portability concerns
- Bounce handling
- Pipermail + Archiving mechanism
- Code cleanup
- News
- Misc

### Bugs

- "Stale" addresses don't update properly when new bounces come in (stale means we had some bounces, but delivery to that address started working again before we booted them from the list)
- Treat corrupted queue files more gracefully.

### Documentation

- A detailed feature list
- A user's guide
- A site-admin's guide
- A list-admin's guide
- More in-place documentation
- A developer's guide w/ Architecture and API info, etc.

### General Web UI

- Add a navigation sidebar to all web pages - central links, and list-specific links for list-specific pages.
- NO DEAD ENDS
- Implement cookies for edithtml and admindb
- Make sure when settings are changed, there is always some sort of confirmation!

### List Admin UI

- Make it so mass-subscribe doesn't hang waiting for the mail transport to do all delivery. (This may have been done w/ the admin cookie patches?)
- Time out admin requests, and have them auto-fail after that period.
- Allow the admin to edit posts in the database (put a header in the post noting that it was edited by a moderator, however!)
- Have the option for moderator passwords, so that moderators don't have access to the general list options.
- An -urgent address for each list that may only be posted to by the list admin. It will seem to be sent to the whole list, but will deliver to everyone ASAP, and not wait for digests.
- A web UI to the -urgent address.
- Better options for the policy on bundling digests (periodic w/ arbitrary periods, size based, a combo of the two, etc).
- A button that will bundle a digest right now (tm).
- Ability to set the next digest volume and issue number from the Web
- A generic error template page.
- An option for setting the precedence header.
- Make the MM-tags accept useful options where appropriate.
- Revamp the admindb user interface, it's fairly clunky (include a decent cataloging mechanism based on the file system).
- Be able to edit ALL the web pages, as well as the mail messages.
- Use templates from the templates dir until the list owner changes the page, so the site admin can change them...
- All the list-admin to require approvals for unsubs
- Allow the admin to disable option settings by users
- Allow the admin to easily "retire" a list, both through the Web or email commands.
- Ability to set defaults for the various user settings from the "Membership Management" page.
- Allow admins to control and set individual headers, adding, removing, or overriding those in the original message (sometimes very useful, but could be dangerous!)
- member management page should display case-preserved email addresses (but still sort case-insensitively).

### List Member UI

- Editing your user options should put you back to the edit-options page.
- Allow the user to be excluded from postings if they're getting them in the to: or cc: headers.
- An option to change your email address. Or what might be easier: allow a user to clone the options of an existing user into a new address.
- Allow users to specify a different address for password reminders (w/ confirmation), or come up w/ a better strategy for remailing lists (could be done as the default, given a generic filter mechanism).
- Allow the user to get BOTH normal and digested delivery (but I still don't understand why someone would want this)

### Site Administrator's UI

- Make a web based site admin UI for adding lists, deleting lists, etc.
- Use a better storage mechanism for the site admin password
- Improve list deletion by requiring a valid password (from the shell script)

### Email Handling

- Implement a more general (form-based, like the netscape email filter) filtering/bouncing/etc. mechanism. Or use VERP.
- Allow for programs to run that perform filtering / reformatting.
- Set aside messages IMMEDIATELY as a rescue mechanism... make sure no mails are ever lost, even if there turned out to be a bad Mailman bug.

### Mailcmd interface

- Provide an email interface to administrative commands.
- Allow email unsubs from matching address to unsubscribe, possibly adding an "allow open unsubscribes" option to control this. Also, adding a confirmation with hit-reply to resubscribe.

### Portability concerns

- Replace cron stuff with our own scheduling mechanism

### Bounce handling

- Add more patterns for bounce handling
- Occasionally remove stale bounce entries
- Send mail to people that are being removed w/o their knowlege (even though they're likely not to get it).
- Clean the code up, make it more robust and efficent (see also bugs)
- Or trash the current approach and use something better
- Reminders to disabled addresses. The idea is that if an addr is disabled due to bouncing, we should send out periodic reminders. We may want to do this for explicitly disabled addrs too, but perhaps with a different schedule.

### Pipermail + Archiving mechanism

- Search engine for archives
- Provide downloadable tar.gz's of the html archives
- sort by date should go most-recent to oldest
- allow list owner to edit archive messages
- support for alternative archiving systems, e.g. MHonArc, Hypermail
- archive link should do *something* reasonable before the first message has been posted to the list.

### Code cleanup

- Use the re module where regexp and regsub are used.
- Refine any remaining unqualified exception guards to specify target exceptions, when appropriate.
- Turn standard mailman exceptions into class exceptions. (In particular, categorize into, eg, message-hold vs other sorts of exceptions.)
- Make error messages indicate the file, mailing list, etc at fault, when possible.
- Seperate edit-options from the subscribe script.
- Remove dead code, etc.

### News

- Allow crossposting. This means no errors on duplicate messages, and also avoiding the need to approve separately for each list.

### Misc

- Automatically update aliases again (fix alias wrapper)
- Make the listinfo pages static, and have them regenerate when options are changed, or html is edited.
- Make it so Mailman can run as a threaded server (this feature should be optional).
- The threaded server should be able to off its workload to friendly machines if it is overworked (distributed support).
- Refine locking to lock only necessary sections to get rid of superfluous contention.
- Implement member profiles, using a class to store name, organization, description, etc, and default option settings. The lists still can have their own data, but the user can set defaults in their profile...
- Need to go through and verify there are no obvious security problems.
- Restrict file and directory permissions as much as possible without breaking Mailman functionality.