Mailman's "topics" feature (was: Threading and digests)

[Ben Scott]

On 3/28/07, Ric Werme <ewerme at comcast.net> wrote:
> Hmm, the [Mailman] edit page mentions:
>
> Which topic categories would you like to subscribe to?
[...]
> That I might read up on.  What do you know about it?

  I've never used it, but my understanding from the web UI help is as follows:

  The list admin defines the Topics.  Each Topic gets one or more
regular expressions associated with it.  Mailman scans every submitted
message to categorize it into a Topic.  It looks at the "Subject" and
"Keywords" headers.  It also looks at the first few lines (5 by
default) of every message body for anything that looks like those
headers.

  List subscribers may choose to only receive messages in particular
Topics.  I'm not sure, but it sounds like if you do not pick any
Topics, you get all list mail.  As soon as you pick a Topic, you only
get mail matching your selected Topics.

  It isn't clear to me, but it sounds like if a message is not matched
into a Topic, only the "send me everything" users will get the
message.  Likewise, I dunno if a single message can be matched into
more than one Topic.

> And does it apply to digests?

  According to the web UI: "Note that this feature only works with
regular delivery, not digest delivery."

-- Ben