Section C.7. Mailing List Managers

C.7. Mailing List Managers

We define mailing list management software as software that manages various aspects of running an email list. Such aspects include managing user subscriptions and privacy, spam and virus blocking, and sending daily digests and message archiving.

Mailing list managers are crucial in the open source development world, since mailing list archives can become a knowledge base for an open source project and can help foster a community around the project. A healthy community is critical to the success of an open source project.

C.7.1. Mailing List Manager Solutions

Solutions in the mailing list manager space tend to be software programs that are tightly integrated with email servers, use filesystems for storing messages, and provide a web- and email-based interface. They provide easy access to mailing list archives; more mature solutions also provide searchable archives.

C.7.2. Mailing List Manager Capabilities

Here is a list of mailing list manager capabilities:

List administration

The ability to subscribe and unsubscribe to mailing lists and options to manage subscription such as per-message delivery or digest delivery

Support for multiple languages and support for privacy options such as message archive privacy and list-membership database privacy

Membership management

The ability to put subscriptions on hold temporarily and the ability to support real names

Content management

The ability to handle MIME attachments

Delivery capabilities

Support for delivery options such as per-message and digest delivery, and the ability to handle bounced messages properly

Archiving capabilities

Seamless, built-in archiving or support for external list archives like MHonArc and Gmane

Reporting capabilities

The ability to generate reports for list usage and subscription activity

C.7.3. Mailing List Manager Projects

Open source projects in the mailing list management space tend to be collected around a few stable solutions, such as Mailman, Majordomo, and ListProc. With the advent of RSS and web-based forums and the overwhelming amount of spam in a typical user's inbox, collaboration via email lists is not an area of active development.

The open source developer communityand technical users elsewherestill use mailing lists effectively. Any enterprise should look into mailing lists as a low-cost way of building a community and a knowledge base of product support and best practices.

C.7.4. Mailman

Mailman is one of the first mailing list managers that moved over to a web-based interface paradigm successfully in the late 1990s. Today it is the de facto mailing list manager in the open source world. It is the default mailing list manager available on SourceForge.net, and it is used widely elsewhere. It offers all of the basic and most of the advanced features one could hope for in a mailing list manager, and it integrates with most email servers and email archivers. It is also well documented and has an active, vibrant community that provides support.

C.7.4.1 Product strengths

• It supports the list moderator's role separate from the list administrator's role, allowing one person to administer the system-specific issues of many mailing lists and delegate list moderator roles to someone else, such as power users in the mailing list.

• It enjoys a large and active user community.

C.7.4.2 Product weaknesses

• Its web-based interface is less than pretty.

• It has no built-in ability to search on message archives.

C.7.5. Dada Mail

Dada Mail is a general-purpose mailing list manager targeted toward small to midsize enterprises and personal web sites. It started out in the classic open source fashion: one guya self-described noncomputer geekbuilt and released a good first version and then kept up with support issues and enhancements to grow it into community-supported software. A professional version, with advanced features, is also available.

C.7.5.1 Product strengths

• It features a powerful and easy-to-use web-based control panel.

• It offers support for sending small "batches" for large subscriber bases.

• A book is available about the product.

C.7.5.2 Product weakness

• True community mailing lists are hard to configure.