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Managing Mailing Lists
The Scoop
You subscribe to a handful or more mailing lists. You decide to start one yourself to fill a hitherto ignored niche. Which Mailing List Manager (MLM) do you pick? Where do you find docs for them? And how best do you go about managing the list -- performing duties of list mom, keeping everyone on topic and trolls off the list?
Alan Schwartz's Managing Mailing Lists will be your trusty guide, provided, of course, you're using one of the MLMs he writes about (Majordomo, SmartList, LISTSERV Lite, Listproc). He summarises how mail and mailing lists work, the applicable RFCs, how to install and configure the MLMs, how to administer them, and provides a reference to each MLM. There's enough detail here to grow you from a basic, competent list administrator to a near-wizard.
What's to LikeMany of us may assume we already know all we need to know about the basics. I've been running my own server for several years, and I still learned a few things reading the introduction. In fact, it should be required reading for anyone running a mailing list, assuming they are not already in the wizard category. Too many list admins I know are comfortable running a list, but don't understand how all the components work together. Then they wet themselves when something doesn't work and they have no idea where to start looking for the problem.
Chapter 1 provides a quick tour of mail headers, the relevant RFCs, email programs (MUAs, eg, Mutt, Pine, Eudora), mail transport agents (MTAs, eg, Sendmail, Postfix, qmail, etc.), mail reflectors (eg, Sendmail's alias file), and, finally, mailing list managers -- what they do, don't do, what they do well, what they don't do well.
Chapter 2 describes how to design a mailing list, everything from naming a list, to posting guidelines, to moderated vs non-moderated, to exploders and newsgroups, to handling large lists, to choosing your MLM (philosophy, features, programming language and source availability). This is a long, detailed chapter with plenty of valuable tidbits for the budding list administrator.
Chapters 1 and 2 stand on their own as the best discussions of list construction, management and protocol that I've seen yet. Everyone running a list will find something of value here, whether technical or political.
Troubleshooting mailing lists is covered in Chapter 8 (why not chapter 3?), and, while it's very short, it is a good summary of what can go wrong and how to fix the problems. This is perhaps a more difficult issue today than when the book was published because in the fight to thwart spammers, it's getting more and more difficult to sort out just why some list members cannot receive or post mail.
Each MLM gets its own chapter to help you install and configure the product, a separate chapter to administer each MLM, and an appendix which summarises the commands and directory structures.
Did you know you can maintain your own lists with Sendmail? I didn't realise just how powerful it can be when combined with formail and procmail. While I use Postfix as my MTA, not Sendmail, Postfix is designed to replace Sendmail and therefore most of the tricks for managing lists with Sendmail work with Postfix. I spent a few entertaining hours exploring just what can be done with these few handy tools. Of course, neither Sendmail or Postfix are as powerful as dedicated MLMs, but you can still accomplish a great deal with them.
What's to ConsiderThe book is three years old. Each MLM was already a mature product when the book was written, and none have changed very much since 1998. The biggest change is perhaps with Listproc -- it's no longer free. But otherwise the products have undergone minor revisions, mostly bug fixes and small, new, features.
Mailman, the Gnu MLM isn't covered. But then Mailman either didn't exist in 1998 or it was too new to enjoy sufficient popularity to justify a chapter. qmail, which allows each user to create their own mailing lists, is mentioned, but isn't documented -- again probably because it didn't enjoy the popularity it has now.
Summary and Table of ContentsManaging Mailing Lists is still relevant despite its age. The introductory chapters are excellent and could hardly be improved upon if it were re-written today. If you're going to manage a mailing list and plan to use another MLM, Mailman for example, which is not documented in the book, it is still worthwhile buying a copy. If you already have some experience managing lists as either a list mom or server admin, you'll still learn something. It is, I think, one of the best O'Reilly books I've read -- and I've got a few shelves full of them.
- Introduction
- Designing a Mailing List
- Maintaining Lists with Listproc
- Maintaining Lists with Majordomo
- Maintaining Lists with Smartlist
- Maintaining Lists with LISTSERV Lite
- Maintaining Lists with Sendmail
- Troubleshooting Your Lists
- Administering Listproc
- Administering Majordomo
- Administering Smartlist
- Administering LISTSERV Lite
- Listproc Reference
- Majordomo Reference
- LISTSERV Lite Reference
- Index
You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.
I don't run any mailing lists these days, but in the past ezmlm (the qmail mailing list manager) seemed pretty good and efficient. Odd to mention qmail but not it's MLM.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
I maintain several mailing lists for both work and non-work related topics.. This is the book that taught me how to do it. It certainly gets a thumbs-up from me. It does, however, need a little updating. Maybe the next revision will include some of the newer MLM's.. like Mailman.. that'd be nice.. Also, for security reasons, newer versions of Sendmail want nothing to do with directories that are "group writable". This was a small headache until I decyphered the error messages, but should be taken into account in the next revision of the book. (yes.. I did send e-mail to O'Reilley about this one). Still, like most O'Reilley books... it's worth buying!
chown -R us
However, it should be noted that typically, by default, new lists are created with "reply to list" enabled, no administravia checks, and no message limit.
In other words, these common problems with mailing lists are a result of poor list management and not from stupid users (at least most of the time). It takes but a few seconds to prepare these configurations in Majordomo, and thus there's no reason to not have them if that is something you want to enforce on your list.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
Some have wondered why GCC -- arguably the GNU project's flagship, after the Emacs operating system^W^Weditor -- doesn't use Mailman as a list manager.
Because Mailman has an annoying tendency to be web-based. You have to do the little password thing to do anything interesting, like subscribe.
ezmlm, on the other hand, is near totally administered via email commands. Which is damn handy for automating tasks. [Un]Subscribing, retrieving archives, even banning individual users, is all done by sending an email message to the software. Actually, the commands are all part of the address itself, you don't have to pay special attention to the formatting and contents of the subject line and message body.
And qmail can handle a metric buttload of message in parallel, which is quite handy.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
As far as managing mailing lists goes, Lyris is definitely the best software I've seen - it's fast, reliable, stable, handles bounces well, and has a nice web interface for managing everything. It is also extremely scalable. That's the great part.
Unfortunately, I've also had some less than pleasant experiences trying to customize and extend Lyris. It has a number of hooks for extending it, and has it's own protocol (LCP) for communicating with the server that has bindings in Perl, Java, ASP, and PHP coming soon. However, the programming interfaces depend on a lot of knowledge about how Lyris does things internally, so expect a LOT of trial and error when doing anything interesting. That's the only bad part.
Overall, if you're handling important lists, and don't want to spend too much time on administration, and can afford it (it can get pricey for the high end versions) I would highly recommend Lyris.
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Yes, you can often get mailing list as one daily "digest." He made up a word there, kinda sick really. But you know.
This book taught me how to run Majordomo... I wasn't a complete novice, but mid level and it certainly made things go faster, especially when it came to hacking the aliases file and tying up some loose security knots.
Here's a tip for those of you that use MLMs without archiving functionality: eScribe is a service that subscribes a bot to your mailing list and creates a searchable online archive. Very helpful.