I just heard mention of a commercial mailling list manager, lyris, that upon a tiny bit of investigation looks similar in some ways to mailman - eg, the admin interface layout:

http://www.lyris.com/demo/list/listinfo.html

(listinfo?), the orientation on web interfaces, "automatic error handling" (bounce handling), built-in archives, built-in mail engine (for "blinding speed"), etc. From poking around a little, it looks like they use perl at least as an extension language - i wonder how it's built.

I'm pretty curious how long it's been around - they claim that:

"Lyris was the first email list server to offer a web interface 
for list administrators and members."

so i wonder if it predates the mailman betas. (I also noticed the phrase

No more "get me off this list!" messages.

on the lyris "about" page (http://www.lyris.com/about.html), , framed as "failsafe unsubscribing" - i think i saw this phrase in a recent mailman-users posting, i would not be surprised if the poster saw it there...)

It has some nice stuff that mailman doesn't - one interesting idea seems to be to use a news server for the archives. That way, archive browsers can use a news interface, or use a web browser to a news/web gateway. (They probably do not do exactly this - the mail interface is a separate product, "multi view", so i'm probably missing something...)

Wish i had more time to investigate, if anyone does, please report back...

Ken Manheimer klm@digicool.com