Cameron Simpson writes:

 > I'm presuming we're talking about ways to bidirectionally mirror between 
 > mailman and a Discourse forum.

Yes.

 > None of that is easy to fix - mailing lists essentially just forward 
 > messages, with some gatewaying of what messages they allow inbound 
 > depending on the list. By contrast, Discourse posts have authors which 
 > must be Discourse users.

That's not a problem in principle, because Mailman at python.org
insists on list membership for posts.  It could be a minor annoyance
for users because Mailman allows a user to have a variety of email
addresses, so you actually have to check which address you've been
using.  Perhaps people with multiple Mailman subscriptions would have
to reconfigure their so they all use the address that Discourse knows,
and their Mailman subscriptions to access mail from that address.  I
don't think that's a big deal, but it's there.

 > I suspect any `In-Reply-To` or `References` would be ignored.

That could be problematic.  Not sure about that.

 > For replies, the email goes to a post-specific address which is used to 
 > stitch the message into an existing Topic discussion thread.

This could work!  I guess for "to message" replies it would cut
Mailman out of the loop (the reply would go author -> Discourse ->
Mailman), so it might be a little odd in the user's mail client and in
Mailman archives (assuming they were desired and permitted).

 > The outgoing `In-Reply-To` and `References` headers are made on the
 > fly when Discourse sends the post as email to whichever users are
 > set up to receive an email copy. The source `Message-ID` is
 > preserved.

I don't see why that would be a big problem.  Threading would be a
little less robust, but would work 99% as well as with full
References.

 > Letting _nonDiscourse_ users reply or post to Discourse is not
 > trivial.

I don't think that would be desired.  It would be nice for users if
existing Mailman User addresses could be grandfathered into Discourse
just to save them ten minutes navigating the Discourse signup, but
it's not obvious to me that's desirable or desired by Discourse
admins.  On the other hand, Discourse's members-only policy is
basically the same as Mailman's, so we'd probably lose a boatload of
python-dev lurkers, but nobody can complain about the principle.

Steve

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