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With David's permission, I quote his message

On Mar 2, 2009, at 1:50 PM, David Champion wrote:

This is a crazy idea I haven't really thought through, and completely
tangent to what you're asking, but what about implementing a Milter
interface (the MTA component, not the filter component) in Mailman
and adopting its semantics?

Then Mailman could take advantage of an existing framework with many
instances in the field already, while limiting the use of those filters
to Mailman (not the whole MTA) and being completely independent of
whichever MTA you're indeed using.

The pymilter project makes writing Milter filters in Python rather easy, so that Mailman-specific milters can be contributed and distributed with
Mailman.  http://www.bmsi.com/python/milter.html

This occurred to me too, so let's explore it.

MM3 has a lot of plugin points, and content filtering could definitely be one as well. For example, I could imagine a filter such as "leave nothing but the first text/plain", "strip out all word documents", etc. implemented as Python modules. Some would come with stock MM3, others could be added by the site administrator. In fact, I think the current mime_delete.py handler could be implemented as a plugin (though I'm not sure you'd want to ;).

The advantage of a plugin architecture here is that I think it is simpler to implement, understand, explain, and skin. The disadvantage is that the individual plugins would be less flexible, and you'd need a site administrator to add third party plugins.

I'm not sure that the milter API is quite appropriate for Mailman, which has a much different architecture than an MTA. For example, it doesn't make sense for Mailman to expose SMTP callbacks since that will have happened long before Mailman gets its paws on the message. But something /like/ this could make a lot of sense.

Barry

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