Re: [SLUG] Best Mailing List software?

[Graeme Robinson <graemer@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08:41 AM 04/09/2001 +1000, Crossfire wrote:
> Steve Kowalik was once rumoured to have said:
> > On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 05:41:09PM +1000, Jon Teh uttered:
> > > > Whatever you do, don't run Majordomo.
> > >
> > > What's wrong with Majordomo?
> > >
> > Does the nickname 'Majordumbo' ring any bells?
> > It's slow, bloated and crap.


> Majordomo is moderately easy to set up if you're using sendmail as
> your MTA.


Majordomo was a worthy list manager for a long time but it has been made 
obsolete with modern list managers - it has weak security, poor bounce 
handling, no spam handling and poor archiving.

I've recently been installing ezmlm and recommend it because of it's high 
security (cookie based commands), excellent spam handling (rejects 'bulk' 
headed email, & addressing not in cc or to), wondrous bounce handling 
(anyone who has administered majord lists will appreciate the 
auto-unsubscribing of consistently bouncing emails), attachment stripping 
and the way it rejects html posts.  It's design is optimised for the qmail 
MTA, being written by the same person (Dan Bernstein) though I expect you 
can make it work with other mailers.

ezmlm doesn't have great or fancy web managment interfaces though some 
people are working on this now (I still subscribe to the ezmlm mailing 
list).  It does have built in archiving tho and you can create digests 
automatically when you setup the list proper.




> Its fairly solid for small lists, for larger lists, you may start
> running into memory problems since sendmail tries to handle the list
> as a single delivery envelope.  [They use the external list alias
> mechanism].
>
> In its simplist configuration, majordomo does no archiving or header
> modifications to messages sent.  You can set it up to do both however,
> but its a more complicated process since majordomo configuration is
> mostly manual.
>
> I've had majordomo set up on a variety of systems for small lists
> (5-20 people) because it is generally low-fuss to get going initially.
> I have, however, switched to mailman for managability reasons.
>
> Mailman is a much nicer list manager, but it has a more complicated
> initial set up as well as requiring python.  (not a huge problem with
> debian because the mailman package handles a lot of the set up for
> you, but it was a pain on redhat 7.0).  However, Mailman is generally
> a lot easier to manage via its Web interface, and is reputed to have
> one of the best bounce handlers out there, as well as having an
> awesome moderated list interface.
>
> C.
> --
> --==============================================--
>   Crossfire      | This email was brought to you
>   xfire@xxxxxxxx | on 100% Recycled Electrons
> --==============================================--
>
> --
> SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
> More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug