I am thinking of adapting a collapsible, outlinable, no-page refresh, on-demand message-body load browser-based message thread interface I made (see http://www.neotitans.com/page.gif) to work with GNU Mailman (among other things) lists.
Ideally, I would like it to function as a 'www-interface gateway' that works with all existing Mailman raw archives. From what I've been researching, one would need some kind of index into the raw mbox file, either a mail summary file format or a database which would contain file seek pointers into the raw mbox.
It would then use a ranged HTTP request to retrieve only the particular message body it needs to display (would this work?). Several issues arise which I'd be glad to have input on from the experts on this list:
I. Which mbox index / mail summary file format to use?
The Mozilla .msf format looks like a strong candidate. Does anyone have other suggestions? Does Mailman maintain such a mail summary file and is it publicly accessible by default?
II. index / mail summary file performance and maintenance
Mozilla .msf files can be regenerated on the fly but for a 100MB mailbox (Python-list's is 600MB+!), it already takes fairly long (a few minutes). Assuming index file corruption is very rare, then this should not be a real problem.
III. index / mail summary file hosting issues
If an index/mail summary file is not available by default, and such a www-interface gateway were to work with no additional work on the list manager's part, then the index/mail summary file would have to be generated by the machine hosting the gateway instead.
- What then, would be the mechanics of the (constant) remote reindexing that would need to be done as new messages come in? Would it be possible to just constantly poll the size of the raw mbox and if it has changed, to just reindex using data starting from the last retrieved file position?
- How often do list admins compact/expunge their raw archive mboxes?
Everytime they do, afaik, it would require the index / mail summary file to be regenerated.
- Is it possible, then, for the www-interface gateway to automatically sense if the remotely hosted raw archive mbox has been expunged/compacted?
- Also, how would the www-interface gateway machine know when its index / mail summary file has been corrupted?
A second possible approach would be for the www-interface gateway machine to maintain its own copy of the raw archive and constantly rsync it with the one maintained by the list admin. This will probably only be feasible if Mailman list admins provide rsync access to the raw mailbox archive.
- Would adding rsync serving of the raw mailbox to Mailman be a good idea? (If it was in Mailman, it is more likely to be enabled by default).
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