[Wylug-discuss] Mailing list software

[Anne Wilson]

On Saturday 17 April 2010 21:46:49 Chris Davies wrote:
> Christopher Brown wrote:
>  > I'm looking at deploying a mailing list for $DAYJOB. I have narrowed
>  > it down to:
>  > GNU Mailman
>  > phplist
>  > sympa
>  > 
>  > I was wondering if anyone had experience of the above and could
>  > comment.
> 
> We use mailman at $DAYJOB, too, for both external customer lists and
> (low frequency) internal staff announcements.
> 
> We run it in moderated announcement mode (i.e. all messages are
> reviewed, for "safety"). It's fiddly to set up but it works pretty well.
> In terms of usability, think of an web application from about 8 years
> ago and you won't be far off the mark. FYI, it doesn't attempt to track
> delivery receipts, but it does do a good job handling bounces. It
> doesn't provide any features for customised (templated) messages.
> 
> I tried Sympa a year or so ago and never managed to get past the setup
> stage. Perhaps I need to try again, but the documentation threw me
> totally. (No, I can't recall why - it was too long ago.)
> 
The Mandriva mailing lists have always used Sympa - and users have begged them 
to change, over the years.  I can't remember the details much, as I haven't 
been reading the lists for quite a long time, other than that it dropped users 
for no obvious reason, from time to time.  It might be worth googling on that, 
to get an idea of the problems encountered.

I don't think it's coincidence that high-volume mailing lists mostly use 
mailman.  My only personal experience of it is setting up a small ML on my 
ISP's server, so I didn't have to do the initial mailman setup.  Certainly it 
was easy to set up the list, from that point, though.  I also moderate a 
couple of public MLs.  Again, I'm comfortable with that - and if you need to 
delegate that, that might be important.

Anne
-- 
KDE Community Working Group
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