Comments on: mailing-list ++?

By: seth vidal

seth vidal — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 05:24:08 +0000

So, despite it being in perl and therefore dirty, the features in the web interface of sympa were rather impressive. sympa is an open source mailing list manager with a rather ineresting web front end.

Give it a try or test it out at:
http://www.sympa.org/

-sv

By: Advogato - Recent Blog Entries

Advogato - Recent Blog Entries — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:58:02 +0000

[...] Syndicated 2007-11-13 17:54:59 from Luis Villa’s Blog [...]

By: Luis

Luis — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:55:48 +0000

I should have specified- completely web-based; I expect this group to outlive my interest in it, and don’t want to foist my technology choices off on the next generation. So anything requiring anything command-line is out. Also, almost certainly needs a commercial hosting option.

Also, gmane is out; most likely this will remain a private, members-only list.

Sean: because (among other things) the list will probably feature a lot of discussion of google and privacy issues, so I expect it to attract people who might be sensitive to the use of google; and because they don’t (as far as I can see) provide export facilities, and I refuse to lock anyone into something that can’t be accessed that way.

More to the point, I’m not sure what those extra features do for me- I’ve been moderating a private list on google groups for a couple years now, and only once have we tried to use any of those features- and it was a failure. I’m hoping that looking at open source alternatives will perhaps suggest to me (1) that some of those features are worthwhile and (2) that they work.

By: Sean

Sean — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:50:12 +0000

Just use Google Groups. If it does what you need, why try to (poorly) emulate it on your own server? Groups can work exactly like a mailing list, provides a web archive, and allows web posting (which is the biggest lacking feature on general mailing lists - you can’t participate unless you opt-in to getting your inbox flooded with a bazillion posts a day, even if you’re only interested in 4% of them).

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:42:23 +0000

Also, for moderation, you might look at either listadmin or maildirman, depending on mail volume and number of lists. The former gives you a command-line interface to moderate mail, and the latter turns the moderation queues into a maildir that you can serve up with IMAP and moderate with mutt or any other mailer.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:36:14 +0000

My suggestion: make a normal mailing list, but also get it archived in gmane. That will then give you RSS feeds, which you can aggregate on your project’s homepage to give a “last ten threads on the mailing list”.

By: Matt Sayler

Matt Sayler — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:33:39 +0000

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.elitists/12207/focus=12255

You may (or may not) find useful infos in this recent thread. I didn’t find any real conclusions, though.