[pmwiki-users] Mail Post Manual Trigger

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sat, Apr 30, 2005 at 10:19:18AM +0200, Joachim Durchholz wrote:
> >>Any questions left? ;-)))
> >
> >Sure.  "Who's going to write this?"
> 
> :-)

> MLMs are difficult because the same medium is used for sending and 
> receiving - this offers a potential for mail loops that can quickly eat 
> up all available bandwidth (both in bounce messages and if two mailing 
> lists accidentally end up subscribing to each other). To avoid problems, 
> MLMs must be rock-solid from day one - and I think that's the reason why 
> writing a MLM is such a scare project.

Yes, that's one of the reasons MLMs are difficult, but it's not the
only one.

> PmWiki wouldn't have that problem.  It doesn't accept contributions by 
> email. 

Indeed, since PmWiki is PHP script it cannot accept *anything* via 
email.  I never intended to imply that we'd be processing incoming
emails, at least not for this limited purpose.

> >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.
> 
> Well, yes, but I don't think that it's the PHP/PmWiki side of things 
> that will run into server limits. If PmWiki fires off a single email 
> with multiple recipients, the work is done in the mail transport system 
> and not subject to any PHP limits.

False -- many MTAs place limits on the number of outgoing recipients
per message, and even if they don't, not separating the messages into
smaller batches can cause other issues.

> >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).
> 
> That would be a separate mailing list per wiki page.  

Not necessarily -- one could have a single mailing list and some
way to allowing subscribers to use the MLM to filter messages
at the MLM level.

> (The whole point is that I'd like to see it as a 
> PITS issue with a realistic chance of being implemented this decade or so.)

I think it'll realistically get implemented; I just don't like
the approaches discussed thus far.  I have this feeling that there's
a better, more powerful approach to this (probably based on WikiTrails)
than simply tacking lots of email addresses onto individual pages
in the wiki.

Pm