Which mailing list manager should I use?

September 12, 2005 5:34 PM

Best mailing list manager? I'm running Postfix and Dovecot on a Debian Sarge box.

It's for a customer with an approximately 1000-person almost-daily email alert list. They have to pay a lot of money to get on the list, so it shouldn't be possible for some random person to subscribe. It should have a nice web management interface for my customer to do maintenance and pruning, but doesn't have to. It should also have a good security track record, and preferably be F/OSS. It would be nice if it had some kind of intelligent heuristic for removing bad (bouncy) email addresses from future mailings.

Which mailing list manager should I use? ezmlm? majordomo? Something else? Are there questions I should be asking about it that I'm not thinking of? I've never been responsible for someone's mailing list before.

posted by evariste to computers & internet (10 comments total)

I should add that they're not interested in allowing the list to be used for discussion, so people shouldn't be able to send out messages to the list. It's one-way communication.
posted by evariste at 5:43 PM on September 12, 2005

mailman. It offers every feature you listed
posted by johannes at 5:48 PM on September 12, 2005

This is shallow, but I find gnu mailman's web interface ugly.
posted by evariste at 6:09 PM on September 12, 2005

I personally like majordomo. But then again, I'm fond of half working things held together by duct tape (thats why I run unix, after all).

That, and I'm anti-gnu whenever possible.

As a real plus, having all administration done over email makes it easier for me to keep track of what I've done, and requests that have been made.
posted by devilsbrigade at 6:40 PM on September 12, 2005

If I actually read the question, I'd see that you actually wanted a web interface. There are several available. I haven't used any of them.

See here.
posted by devilsbrigade at 6:44 PM on September 12, 2005

I second Mailman. I've used it for lots of lists. Easy to set up, it does the things you need and more. Try it.
posted by autojack at 7:24 PM on September 12, 2005

I second mailman (and it comes with the ability to redesign the templates for the web interface relatively easily).

It is especially good at dealing with bouncing e-mail addresses, and gives you a great deal of control over this (e.g. you can change how many bounces trigger a response and what exactly is the response -- unsubscribe or supsend, etc.)
posted by winston at 7:58 PM on September 12, 2005

I went with DadaMail, which is fantastic so far. My customer isn't very computer-savvy, so it looks perfect for him.

devilsbrigade, why are you against gnu stuff? Just curious.
posted by evariste at 8:43 PM on September 12, 2005

I like Ecartis; Mailman makes me want to hit things, like people who think MLM's *need* passwords, and that I'm stupid enough to need 20 "reminder" messages with my password in plaintext every month.

Also, I found it really quite easy to make it Just Work[tm] without constant messing with alias files etc to add lists and vhosts, but then I like tinkering with this stuff.
posted by Freaky at 9:14 AM on September 13, 2005

I don't know how religious you are about these sorts of things, but Majordomo is no longer part of the Debian distribution due to a license conflict. This security alert details why. Regardless, this makes it less convenient to install on a Debian system as it is not in the default repositories.

I too find the password requirement of Mailman irritating. Here's jwz's take on the subject: Mailman Considered Harmful. Here's the Mailman developers' response: Mailman Considered Beneficial.

I have not installed it yet, but one mailing list manager that looks promising to me that I've been meaning to test is Sympa. The current Debian stable is 4.1 whereas the latest released version is 5.1. I am not sure how much difference there is between these versoins.
posted by finn at 10:45 AM on September 13, 2005