Mailing List (un)Subscribe button?

[jlhawn]

Hina sent out an email earlier asking for help with setting up a 'subscribe to mailing list' functionality on the site. There are a few obstacles that need to be overcome to get this to work:

• Send the request to the mail server
  • The easiest way to subscribe/unsubscribe folks from lists is from the mail server itself. I hate mailman, so it's probably a good idea to get a web server running on port 80 on mail.csua that can handle email subscriptions. We would style it ourselves and write the back-end ourselves.
  • update mail to Debian Squeeze/Wheezy. Making any changes to mail right now is very painful 😩 The best thing to do is to make a new mail.csua that runs on the latest version of Debian and then we can copy all of the current mail.csua settings and swap it out magically. This takes some work.
  • Finally, we'll be able to think about how to design a mailing list (un)subscribe feature that is orders of magnitude better than using mailman's web interface. This is the fun part. We can setup Nginx + Go or Python which are pretty easy to work with and write a system that uses an email verification system to subscribe/unsubscribe people on mailing lists.