-Design notes and philosophy
----------------------------
-
-public-inbox spawned around some basic ideas
---------------------------------------------
-
-* Public, non-real-time, archivable communication is essential to
- Free and Open Source software development.
-
-* Contributing to Free and Open Source projects should not require the
- use of non-Free/non-Open Source services or software.
-
-* Graphical user interfaces should not be required for text-based
- communication.
+Design notes
+------------
Challenges to running normal mailing lists
------------------------------------------
* public-inbox uses SMTP for posting. Posting a message to a public-inbox
instance is no different than sending a message to any _open_ mailing
- list. Any existing spam filtering on an SMTP server is also effective
- on public-inbox.
+ list.
+
+* Existing spam filtering on an SMTP server is also effective on
+ public-inbox.
* readers may continue using use their choice of mail clients and
mailbox formats, only learning a few commands of the ssoma(1) tool
list.
* Email is already the de-facto form of communication in many Free Software
- communities.
+ communities..
* Fallback/transition to private email and other lists, in case the
public-inbox host becomes unavailable, users may still directly email
* git is distributed and robust while being both fast and
space-efficient with text data. NNTP was considered, but does not
- support compression and places no guarantees on data/transport
+ support delta-compression and places no guarantees on data/transport
integrity. However, an NNTP gateway (read-only?) is possible.
* As of 2014, 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.
+ and *BSD distributions. NNTP is not as widely-used nowadays.
+
+Laziness
+--------
+
+* A list server being turned into an SMTP spam relay and being
+ blacklisted while an admin is asleep is scary.
+ Sidestep that entirely by having clients pull.
+
+* Eric has a great Maildir+inotify-based Bayes training setup
+ going back many years. Document, integrate and publicize it for
+ public-inbox usage, encouraging other admins to use it (it works
+ as long as admins read their public-inbox).
+
+* Custom, difficult-for-Bayes requires custom anti-spam rules.
+ We may steal rules from the Debian listmasters:
+ svn://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-listmaster
+
+* Full archives are easily distributable with git, so somebody else
+ can take over the list if we give up. Anybody may also run an SMTP
+ notifier/delivery service based on the archives.
+
+* Avoids bikeshedding about web UI decisions, GUI-lovers can write their
+ own GUI-friendly interfaces (HTML or native) based on public archives.
+ Maybe one day integrated MUAs will feature a built-in git protocol support!
Web notes
---------