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Which Mailing List Manager Do You Recommmend?
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?
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 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.
Firstly, I'm NOT the most gifted sys admin out there, I'm mainly focussed on PHP development. However, even with my basic sysadmin skills I've successfully setup both postfix and mailman.
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.
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).
-> Capt Cosmic <-
> You don't have to use maildir; I used it fine with mbox style files.
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.
--TZS. (OSOAL - The choice of a gnu generation)
Mailman has a number of weaknesses / missing features which make unsuitable for some uses. Here are a few.
* 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.
Others have mentioned it, but I'll offer my opinion as well. Unless you're doing something fairly bizarre, Sendmail might be overkill for you as an MTA. QMail is a breeze to set up and config, it's as secure as can be, and it handles heavy loads of mail with ease.
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.
Topher