Challenges to running normal mailing lists
------------------------------------------
+
1) spam
2) bounce processing of invalid/bad email addresses
3) processing subscribe/unsubscribe requests
Use existing infrastructure
---------------------------
+
* public-inbox can coexist with existing mailing lists, any subscriber
to the existing mailing list can begin delivering messages to
public-inbox-mda(1)
Why email?
----------
+
* Freedom from proprietary services, tools and APIs. Communicating with
developers and users of Free Software should not rely on proprietary
tools or services.
Why git?
--------
+
* git is distributed and robust while being both fast and
space-efficient with text data. NNTP was considered, but does not
support delta-compression and places no guarantees on data/transport
- integrity. However, an NNTP gateway (read-only?) is possible.
+ integrity. However, a read-only NNTP gateway is implemented.
-* As of 2014, git is widely used and known to nearly all Free Software
+* As of 2016, git is widely used and known to nearly all Free Software
developers. For non-developers it is packaged for all major GNU/Linux
and *BSD distributions. NNTP is not as widely-used nowadays.
Why perl 5?
-----------
+
* Perl 5 is widely available on modern *nix systems with good a history
of backwards and forward compatibility.
Laziness
--------
+
* Stick to dependencies available in Debian main, this should make it
easier for potential users to install, and easier for distro
maintainers to pick up.
Web notes
---------
+
* Getting users to install/run ssoma (or any new tool) is difficult.
The web views must be easily read/cache/mirror-able.
What sucks about public-inbox
-----------------------------
+
* Lack of push notification. On the other hand, feeds seem popular.
* some (mostly GUI) mail clients cannot set In-Reply-To headers
Scalability notes
-----------------
+
Even with shallow clone, storing the history of large/busy mailing lists
may place much burden on subscribers and servers. However, having a
single (or few) refs representing the entire history of a list is good
Copyright
---------
+
Copyright 2013-2015 all contributors <meta@public-inbox.org>
License: AGPLv3 or later <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/agpl-3.0.txt>