enemies of carlotta is a mailing list manager in the style of ezmlm, but written in python by lars wirzenius. one problem with it is that it is written as a pretty monolithic application, as opposed to ezmlm’s series of commands that are run for a few different addresses. but there’s some interesting design decisions made. it doesn’t implement digests yet.

one of my biggest annoyances with ezmlm these days is that the digest generation is not character-encoding aware. so for a list like the mysql japanese list, the digests, particularly the plain-text one, look like garbage. this is more frustrating because i spent a fair amount of time making sure the web-based archive got the encoding issues right.

the mysql lists are set up so that both mime-encoded and plain-text digests are generated, using a dummy list and some judicious symlinks. when we took over the maxdb lists from sap, the existing lists only had a plain-text format, and the subscribers clamored for that when we only had the mime-encoded versions available.