State of Things

[Gary Kramlich]

> My personal priority order for the email forwarding / distribution lists
> would be:
>
> 1. Wiktel (because free and I can do the setup work)
> </conflict of interest alert>
> 2. Fastmail (by reputation)
> 3. Mailgun
>
> But I don't particularly care between #2 and #3. r0bby recommended
> Mailgun. I'm sure it'll be great.

I don't particularly care either, I just want one we can go with and
not have to deal with all the headaches of running email.

>  > "Would IMF be willing to pay me for this work?"
> or from the original thread:
>  > if the board would like to pay me to do this
>  > stuff, that would be very cool but of course not expected.
>
> Yes, please, can we just pay Gary to setup Discourse as he proposed?
>
> Gary, how much money do you want for the following statement of work:
>
> 1. "roll out Discourse[3] on a DigitalOcean node, import the mailman
> users lists into it, and create spaces for Pidgin, Finch, Purple, GNT,
> and IMFreedom on it with appropriate threads and stuff to replace our
> existing mailing lists."
>
> 2. Spend up to 8 hours attempting to import the mbox archives from
> Mailman into Discourse, with no care given to preserving URLs.

This statement of work isn't quite right as the intent is to leave the
archives where they are[1][2] to avoid redirect hell and breaking tons
of links across the web. However, running pipemail which is a now
unmaintained python2 application in 2023 doesn't sound like the best
idea. I've looked into some alternatives, namely monarch,
mlmmj-webarchiver, and hypermail, but all of those would break the
existing links.  So we either run pipermail (somehow probably just
with an old debian container or pull it done from source, or I can
whip something together in golang pretty quickly as there's multiple
mbox packages.

So we need to decide which way to go to actually define the SOW.

Actually I just looked at this on disk and we might be able to just
copy it out to a directory and serve it with nginx or whatever. I'm
not sure if we'd need the full mbox archives for the lists which would
cut the disk space in about half as well.

[1] https://lists.pidgin.im/pipermail/
[2] https://lists.imfreedom.org/pipermail/

> --
> Richard
>

Thanks,

--
Gary Kramlich <grim at reaperworld.com>