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MailArchive ===========

Launchpad uses MHonArch to archive emails and show them on the Web. There are several problems:

• The archiving is slow, it can take days for a message to appear in
  • the web archive though the message was delivered in minutes
• The web pages to not appear as Lp pages, nor do they behave as
  • Lp web pages.
• Private web archives are not accessible because of openid
  • authentication issues

Mailman's internal archiver is pipermail. It maintains a canonical representation of all messages in mbox format. It generates html using templates. It supports monthly mbox archiving which reduces the borden of generating pages for all the messages. Pipermail is considered to be under-developeed and needs feature to support modern needs. See http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/ModernArchiving The mailman config can be set to use the internal archiver, see http://terri.zone12.com/doc/mailman/mailman-admin/node27.html

There are no mail archivers that meet Lp's needs. Most large scale hosters write their own service or make extensive customisations to the mediocre archives to meet their needs.

Launchpad needs

Lauchpad wants to access the archive using an API so that the mail messages can be integrated with other Lp pages:

• Messages arrive in the archive about the same time as they
  • arrive in subscriber inboxes.
  • The message sent to subscribers might contain a perma-link to
    • the message in the archive.
• Show a page listing monthly date and thread indexes for the archive.
  • Presenting monthly slices of messages helps uers to locate
    • messages and provides a sense of age.
  • The page might show a summary of the volume of messages per month
    • to provide a sense of size.
  • The page might have a RSS feed link.
• The index pages show the message subject, author, and date.
  • The page might show a summary of the volume of messages per week/day
• The message page shows the message with linked content.
  • The page has navigation to see the sibling messages.
  • The message has a perma link.
  • Team admins can toggle message visibility
    • (hide spam, abuse, user data, which currently requires a LOSA and a custom script).

Mailman requires a command or an ArchRunner class to send the message to. mailan expects a exit/return code to know if the message is complete or if it must be re-enqueued to try again. Mailman assumes that the archives creates an archive as needed (it currenly passes a lot of data to the mhnoarc command to ensure messages are added to the right archive). It is easier to add an e

Diagram of interaction

Mailman

• <create-archive> <add-message>

• v

mail-archive-command (Posix)

• | |
  • -- mailarchivelib
  | |

Mail-Archive-Service (ReST/JSON)

• ^

• <get-month-indexs> <get-date-index> <get-threat-index> <get-message>

• <hide-message> <import-mbox*> <forward-message*>

Launchpad

* actions are not essential

Design considerations

* MBox is the standard for storing a collections of messages.

• importing and exporting mbox format is a requirement, but it is
  • not necessarilly the mechanism for mangaging indexes or servicing individual messages quickly.
• A common strategy to ensure quick archiving is to create monthly
  • mboxes for each list. This makes monthly and date presentations easy too. This complicates thread indexes since they might span many mboxes.

* ReST/JSON is desirable for webservice API because we could use

• AJAX to interact with it.
• We do not intend to permit browsers ot have direct access to the data
  • because we *think* we want to enhance the message data with links to real users.