Project Lancelot Requirements

(As documented by Anselm in January, 2005.)

Indispensable Features

  • »Virtual-hosting« capable, especially in the Our-ISP.org context -- this is our main beef with Mailman. (DONE)
  • Operable by mail (like ezmlm-idx and Mailman) (DONE)
  • Cookie-based subscription authentication (also for configuration changes) (DONE)
  • Attachment filtering (with or without error message to the sender) (PARTLY DONE)
  • Rejection of messages by non-subscribers (DONE)
  • Support of subscribing addresses that may submit material but will not receive any (DONE)
  • Automated bounce handling
  • Archival of messages (?) I like the way ezmlm-idx unifies digests and the archive. (DONE -- write your own retrieval system, though!)

Fairly Important Features

  • Digests
  • Message moderation
  • Moderators in addition to the list owner
  • Black list for subscribing/submitting addresses
  • Closed mailing list support (only the list owner/moderator can add subscribers)

Nice-to-Have Features

  • Multiple aliases for a list address (suggested by Dieter Heiliger)
  • Web-based administration for subscribers (fairly involved, but would be very nice)
  • Subscription moderation
  • »Disaster moderation« as in Mailman
  • Moderator messages/administration using GPG-signed mail

Things The Architecture Should Allow

(by courtesy of Gerd Aschemann)

  • Alternative sources for subscriber information (LDAP, ...) (DONE, but must be tried)
  • Alternative »sinks« for messages: archive, blog, Usenet, ...

Non-Features

  • Support of 23 different languages
  • Membership list retrieval by subscribers (too complicated, since subscribers must be able to object) (In fact this would not be complicated given the current design. -A.)
  • Usenet gateway

Feel free to add additional ideas to the bottom of this page.