Which Mailing List Manager Do You Recommmend? 36
bobdinkel writes "While I know it isn't the most glamorous thing, mailing lists are a fact of life. And they gotta be managed by someone. In my organization, that someone is me. For whatever reason (they won't exactly say) the powers that be do not want to use majordomo and sendmail. So I pose this question to you, dear reader: What is the best MLM - MTA combo in the Unix world?" One only needs to shake a stick to see the amount of software available that handles mailing lists. Which ones have suited your needs?
Mailman (Score:2)
Mailman Weaknesses (Score:3, Interesting)
* No direct support for announce-only lists.
* It insists on having users use a password to unsubscribe / etc. I've found that most people don't want another password, and they don't need one with other mailing list systems.
* It has no ability to email out a "click here to unsubcribe" link, but rather a link to the above mentioned password system.
Of course it's probably idea for some uses, and I don't mean to disparage it in general, just to say that it's no the ultimate mailing list manager.
Re:Mailman Weaknesses (Score:2, Informative)
You can make a list with announce-only properties by configuring it as moderated, and make the person/accounts who sends the announcements the moderator.
Your points #2 and #3 are really the same argument, that it's better to trade the security for convenience. Obviously, that's debatable and many people will see it as a feature rather than a bug. In practice it is not hard to enter a password in order to unsubscribe.
Re:Mailman Weaknesses (Score:1)
I have many announce-only lists setup like you described, and they work great.
Re:Mailman Weaknesses (Score:2)
Re:Mailman Weaknesses (Score:2)
Mojo Mail (Score:1)
As far as a MTA, I'm partial to qail.
Mailman. (Score:3, Informative)
It really is good software -- easy to administer, and easy for users. I wouldn't bother with Majordomo anymore...
Re:Mailman. (Score:1)
Administration stuff can also be done from the command line.
One thing I'd like to see in Mailman is better support for virtual domains. As it is, you pretty much need a separate install for each domain you want to use it on. You have to do tricks with email aliases on the machine to make it all work.
Re:Where is the obligitory refrence to qmail???? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some smartass somewhere has to mention that qmail and it's impossible-to-manage ezmlm program is a superior solution.
I don't seem to be having any trouble at all adminning small (150 user, 3GB/mo) and mid-size (800-user, ~25GB/mo) qmail installations. This is with Vpopmail too; the mid-size email system is for one domain; there are 36 others on that system too but they're all fairly small. Ezmlm isn't simple, no, but it's no pain in the ass to manage, either. I use QmailAdmin [inter7.com] to do most of the dirty work. I set up the new domain, give the owner the postmaster password and point them to the qmailadmin setup. Piece of cake.
And while we're at it, djbdns rocks the house!
qmail is a very good MTA; I wouldn't trade it for anything else. That doesn't mean I think that djb is a god; I can't stand his daemontools, nor do I like djbdns. Go figure.
Mailing list with email reminders (Score:2)
The list manager would have to handle bounced email, subscribe/unsubsribe requests, etc. Bonus if it could handle mailmerge type functionality (templates), html/text multipart mime, or more advanced features such as cross-list digest. Does anybody know of such a product?
If I don't find such a beast, I will probably have to write one.
Re:Mailing list with email reminders (Score:2)
I think that escapes from the scope of a mailing list manager software package. It's better to use good ol' crontab for that kind of stuff, using the MLM account.
Qmail + ezmlm (Score:3, Informative)
One point is that Qmail's author issued a Cash Reward [cr.yp.to] for the first person to find a security hole in qmail- That was in march 1997 and it still has not been claimed.
compare this to sendmail, where there's a security hole fix in EVERY release.
Qmail is also AWESOME at handling high amounts of email sanely, is absolutely simple to configure, has a large and very supportive user base, and again, it was designed with security in mind.
Apart from that, ezmlm is EASY to configure, and if you get the "qmailadmin" program, you also have an easy web-based configuration interface, if you prefer that. (though, I myself prefer the commandline tools.)
The one thing you'll have to get used to is the 'Maildir' format, which applies to anyone using a shell on the qmail server to check / receive email- mutt has builtin maildir support, there's a patch available for pine.
qmail's home location is http://cr.yp.to/qmail.html [cr.yp.to] and it's supporting community is at http://www.qmail.org [qmail.org]
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:2)
One of the major problems with qmail is its author; his holier-than-thou attitude is a pain to deal with. Just try setting up anti-relay rules in a sane manner, for example; you need to patch it. In fact, there's an insane number of patches for qmail to get it to do things you need to.
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:2)
- Always accept mail to a certain domain (i.e. the local domain for staff/students)
- Allow machines within our local network to relay mail to the outside world
- Not allow external sites to relay mail to other outside sites
I'm pretty sure that I couldn't get 2 and 3 working together without the 'relayclients' patch.The Qmail Dilemma (Score:2)
Blame the author and his license. If it was one of the common open source licenses, someone would put together all the pieces and made an RPM available.
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:1)
You would put the domains that should always receive mail in "rcpthosts", and create lines in your tcpserver configuration for SMTP which set the RELAYCLIENT environment variable for local clients.
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:2)
I don't understand what's difficult about that. I use tcpserver with qmail-smtpd -- I achieve exactly what you want, plus the ability to allow our people to use whatever ISP they want and to relay mail from their IP for 20 minutes after they've successfully checked for mail. I don't recall using a relayclients patch at all, but I do have several other patches applied to my qmail:
I also use vpopmail [inter7.com] which makes it trivial to run a zillion vhosted mail servers with separate mail policies, mailing lists and quotas and finally qmailadmin [inter7.com] which takes care of 99% of the admin needs. What's left is just hand-editing the .qmail-xxx files to do silly things like have one email address go to two mailboxes and so on.
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:2)
When you can code better than DJB then you can speak about his attitude.
I don't consider DJB a good programmer. Zero comments, bare bare bare documentation and one-space indents are not the traits of a good programmer. He writes software with security in mind, and that is a very good thing. I certainly wouldn't hire him based on what I've seen of his source, though.
Re:Qmail + ezmlm (Score:2, Interesting)
True. But once you've seen how much quicker pine can scan through a moderately-sized mailbox stored as Maildir format vs the same thing in traditional mbox format, you'll never to back to storing your mail in single flat files again.
Postfix and Mailman (Score:2, Interesting)
Postfix is a great MTA, its so much faster than Sendmail, and has a very good support group. It also has native support for LDAP, which makes it great for virtual hosting and using for large organisations.
Mailman is a doddle to setup, and if you can be bothered to change the templates can be seamlessly integrated into your web site. Its also incredibly easy to administer.
The combination of the two is complimentary, and I beleive its the preferred setup of the creators of mailman. nuff said.
Check out Listar (Score:3, Interesting)
From their website: Take a look at Listar's feature list, and see the advantages it has over other similar Listserver packages. (anti-spam hooks, ability to strip down MIME messages and remove their attachments, virtual hosts, just to name a few).
Sympa (Score:1)
SmartList (Score:5, Informative)
I use SmartList, which comes with Procmail [procmail.org]. It's kind of a hassle to initially install (there's no smurfy GUI) but it's basic, poweful, and works without any stupidity getting in the way. User subscriptions and unsubscriptions are handled via the time-honored mechanism of mailing to list-request addresses.
The last [slashdot.org] time this came up, lots of people recommended MailMan. As a user, I hate Mailman. So as a mailing list admin, I won't inflict it on people. Here's why:
Compare and contrast this sequence of actions:
With sane mailing list software:
With Mailman:
Now which was easier?
So I use Smartlist for all my mailing lists. Though it is a pain in the ass to configure, it does the "reply to this to confirm" trick completely painlessly from the end user's point of view, and not having that is a deal breaker for me.
I understand that Mailman is trying to provide some measure of security by mailing passwords around, but mailed passwords don't work. By which I mean, they provide no more protection than the "reply to this message to be subscribed" mechanism does. So long as you can tell the web page to mail you your password, the only real validation that is going on is that the person issueing the subscribe request is a person capable of reading mail sent to the address they are subscribing.
It's important that mailing list software do this check, to avoid prank subscriptions. But the "reply to this" method is N less steps than the password-I-don't-know-I-have method, while being absolutely equivalent from a security point of view.
So the password thing is merely irritating and a waste of time: it has no benefits.
Re:SmartList (Score:1)
Painful mailman unsubscribe (Score:2)
Re:Painful mailman unsubscribe (Score:2)
Now, if you wanted to do that on the monthly reminder email, that would be pretty reasonable.
Re:Painful mailman unsubscribe (Score:2)
More praise for Mailman (Score:2)
First, the fact that SF.net uses Mailman says a lot for how powerful it is. It does virtual hosting in a very simple yet effective way.
Setting it up can be a little bit of a drag, getting the right UID for the right wrapper do-dad, but once you overcome that it is SUPER easy to use. I does everything "right," but lets you do it wrong if you choose (for instance, reply-to munging (not trolling here, I don't care what you think on the topic)).
I run a couple of lists, and used to manage several SF.net lists and Mailman really did make it as painless as possible.
Oh, as a bonus it is the GNU mailing list manager! (Not just a GPL one.)
I use Sendmail with it. I don't see that it much matters as long as your MTA meets the requirements of 1. having an "alias" functionality (that can pipe to a script) and 2. has a secure(able) "restricted shell" capibility (i.e. smrsh).
-Peter
QMail + ezmlm (Score:2, Interesting)
Additionally, QMail and ezmlm were written together, with similar design principles, and they complement each other perfectly. They provide and extremely powerful, stable, secure, and featureful mailing solution.
Two notes I do want to point out, however. First of all, while Dan Bernstein is a brilliant coder, he's also a difficult man. His license for QMail is almost non-existent, but it it doesn't allow for modified redistribution. This means that QMail may need to be patched for certain special features.
Additionally, though following in the same vein, the stock version of ezmlm is missing some key features. I would strongly encourage the use of the ezmlm-idx patch, available at ezmlm.org. With this applied, ezmlm becomes one of the most powerful, featureful, and impressive mailing list management programs available.
Mailman troll (Score:1)
;)
-Tongue firmly in cheek,
Snafoo