January 23, 2004

1:03 PM

What's the best (free, easy to install, doesn't hog resources) emai list software for OS X?

I've been running Macjordomo, but it is buggy and hogs resources, slowing down my machine. I manage about 10 local lists, with not more than 20 members of each list.

I thank you, MeFi gestalt...
posted by mecran01 to (5 comments total)

GNU Mailman is my favorite list manager, is free, and ought to be pretty easy to install (isn't there some debianized, proper package manager for OSX now?), and I've never noticed performance issues on any systems running it. Having said that, I should state that I've never run it on your particular flavor of Unix, but there shouldn't be substantial differences.
posted by majick at 1:10 PM on January 23, 2004

That looks great, and I've already located an article on OS X installation. Thanks!
posted by mecran01 at 1:48 PM on January 23, 2004

Before I moved my list onto a web host, I used LetterRip. It's really a fantastic piece of software originally coded by the guys that wrote Claris Emailer.
posted by machaus at 1:54 PM on January 23, 2004

i use mailman, and it is good, but the documentation never seems that great. something that you might find useful one day: you can read the definition of a mailing list into python and examine/change any part of it (using python's introspection, eg __dict__). so when you can't find a way to do something via the user interface (you should also know that it installs a bunch of useful command line programs that do admin-like things) you can always fall back on python.

for example, i run my list on my home server, which is on dhcp - when the address changes (rarely) the python hack lets me alter the address associated with the list.

once you know these things, it's easy to google for more info. but at first, without them, i thought that the web interface was all i had...
posted by andrew cooke at 1:56 PM on January 23, 2004

Mecran01, do you have the link to the article on the OS X installation?
posted by mmangano at 5:23 AM on January 25, 2004