Mailing List Managers?

greyrax asks: "So I'm trying to convince someone to go open source for their list manager. They're about to upgrade to an expensive proprietary solution. With about 400,000 subscribers to this newsletter, a database back-end would certainly be helpful. Bounced address management and easy unsubscribes is important (I've read Smartmail vs. MailMan comparison here). Virtual host support and a web interface are desirable. Any thoughts from the /.ers since this thread last year would be appreciated."

Comments

email interface...

[Fweeky]

One thing I hate is having to "log in with the plaintext password I store and mail you every month without fail to some random mailing list name to do anything because this MLM is too braindead to understand listname-requests, or even listname-(command)".

Whatever you use, make sure it has a clean email interface, and configure it to include rfc2369/rfc2919 List-(Subscribe|Unsubscribe|Post|Help|Owner|Id) headers so I can filter and automate control of it.

Ecartis is a great example of a MLM with support for both email and web-based manglement. Email is the standard double-opt-(in|out) stuff, with various other methods of authentication to make sending batched/automated commands easy for admins. Web emails you a "cookie" (effectively a temporary password), and lets you set up a (secure) password once logged in; if you forget your password, you just don't include it on login and get another cookie.

No monthly spam with one of your passwords going out for all to see to some random location in your filters (mine end up in lists/(test|news|announcements)), and an extensive but by no means required web interface, without the need for a monthly insecure irritating to filter spam.

Sympa

[kiowa]

The company I am working for is currently in the process of selecting a mailing list manager as well. And after a bit of wandering about we are about to settle on Sympa. It seem to have it all. Web-interfaces, sql-backends and fairly good documentation.

We also took a peek on Mailman, but came to the conclusion that it would take too much work on having to integrate it into our design. No stylesheets to edit, and if you want it to integrate into a search engine other than pipermail (which can't search at all, only list threads) you have to get down dirty with the source. And having an extra thread of yet another project isn't a viable solution atm.

A complete solution - the FreeBSD toaster

[gregwbrooks]

If you go here you'll find a great recipe (including install scripts) for a FreeBSD-based solution that includes Qmail and EZMLM-idx, but also includes a webmail interface and wicked-cool support for virtual domains. The setup is supported by an active e-mail list and it's been rock-solid on my moderate-sized lists, as well as much larger lists used by others.

Probably more of a solution than you need, but it's a very good way to take a generic boxen and quickly turn it into a slam-dunk mail server and listserver.

The guy who developed it (Matt Simerson) is uber-conscious of security issues and a helluva nice guy to boot; he's put together an exceptionally tight package from a security standpoint. If nothing else, you may want to look at what he's got and do a modified or stripped-down install.