[pmwiki-users] Mail Post Manual Trigger

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 11:37:22PM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> Neil Herber wrote:
> >How does a "subscriber" figure out which pages they are subscribed
> >to?
> 
> This could be part of the mailpost info.
> Or sent once a month (or something, probably a site-wide configuration).
> 
> >How do they cancel one or more or all subscriptions?
> 
> That's analogous to subscription. No issue here.
> 
> >How do they update their email address?
> 
> Unsubscribe and resubscribe. (Not a pretty solution.)
> 
> >What should the admin do when email starts bouncing?
> 
> PmWiki should automatically stop sending mails.
> [...]
> For that case, there should be a list of mail addresses that cannot
> subscribe. (If the user ever wants to get a subscription, he can send
> another mail to the wiki admin.)
> 
> Any questions left? ;-)))

Sure.  "Who's going to write this?"

More to the point, automated handling of subscriptions, unsubscriptions, 
bounced emails, etc. are traditionally the functions of mailing list 
managers (MLMs), and I can tell you that writing MLMs isn't a trivial 
exercise.  It's easy to write a bad MLM, it's hard to write one that 
works well, reliably, or scales well.  

To borrow from Neil's message, a page that ended up with a few hundred 
subscribers could quickly run into server limits and/or other 
scalability issues, requiring a fairly complex solution.

But perhaps this realization points a way out of the dilemma -- rather
than try to duplicate MLM functionality, maybe we could come up with
a way to use existing MLMs to manage notifications of watch lists?
Just a thought...(haven't had much time for thinking on this issue of
late, so I'm just writing off of the top of my head here).

Pm