Mailman 3 vs Groupserver vs Sympa
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Hi, Kẏra!
Thank you for your interest in Mailman 3! I'm sure I speak for all the developers in saying that we are honored!
That said, what follows is the well-informed (I believe ;-) but individual opinion of one developer, complicated by the fact that Mailman development is quite decentralized because the web admin and archive management interfaces have been hived off into separate projects, as Nico points out.
I'm not sure everybody will be pleased by my next few remarks, either.
If Groupserver meets all your requirements and is stable, I'd have to say that's the odds-on favorite. Mailman 3 core (the user and list database manager, and mail delivery server) is in late beta at this point, and very usable. A few sites are using it in production, though I have no idea how mission-critical those lists are.
However, the web interfaces (Postorius for admin and HyperKitty for archives) are still in flux, and recent development activity in Mailman core has been more focused on security issues (verification and re-signing of digitally-signed posts, refactored REST interface to improve authentication). Finally, Mailman 3 is still really about *mail*. It's not web-centric, although web access is dramatically improved where the features have been implemented.
All that said, Barry still openly admits he wants Mailman 3 to "kill web fora" and secretly hankers after Linux-style World Domination. It might be worth waiting for. :-)
Also, regarding the state of Postorius and HyperKitty you should definitely contact their developers. Most of them do hang out here on mailman-developers, but there hasn't been a lot of traffic about progress recently. I suppose they have their own channels of communication.
You wrote:
Are posts and administration integrated into the web interface?
There is a Messaging Interface (aka MI) being developed by the Systers (as an alternative to Postorius/Hyperkitty) which provides some administration features, access to the archives, and reading and posting support. It is clearly intended to be used internally to an organization rather than as a way to support Mailman's traditional constituency of open subscription, (nearly) open post public lists.
(Of course Mailman has been adapted to other kinds of lists such as anonymized lists, fully personalized lists, and announce lists, but it typically needs a lot of external support for applications like CRM.)
Can you specify a posting rate restriction?
What do you mean? (Presently the answer is "no", but if you mean preventing users from posting more than N times in a day or something like that it would be easy to add.)
Is full css customization for the web interface supported? Is css customization for the email interface supported?
Again, what do you mean by this? Of course you can substitute your own CSS for that distributed by Postorius or HyperKitty in the web interfaces. There is no CSS in the email interface AIUI -- the email interface is whatever email program the user has chosen. I'm pretty sure that's not the question you're asking, though. ??
Is there site-side logging? (as opposed to server side)
What do you mean by "site" and "server"? Sites have to be served.
Is there a link to the post in the web interface in the footer of messages?
If you want one and are using an archive manager that supports it, it's customizable. (I believe HyperKitty does support that.) The Systers' MI assumes a web-based interface, so no link needed.
Now that users are more than just email addresses, can you request to contact a list member?
Not implemented as far as I know. It would be easy to implement.
Can users have multiple email addresses?
Yes.
Are there profile pages where you can see a summary of their latest posts?
Not as far as I know, although HyperKitty could easily provide something like it, if not already implemented.
Note that unlike LinkedIn (for one example) where there's a single profile page and the owner get an edit interface while 3rd parties get a read-only view, HyperKitty and Postorius will have different viewpoints about the user profiles (although HyperKitty can probably access the same information that Postorius does via Mailman core's REST interface).
The Systers MI probably provides a more unified view, but it's pretty alpha at the moment, and Systers-specific.
Are usage statistics provided?
Not by Mailman itself. They are easy to provide by trawling the logs (the Mailman 2 approach). In Mailman 3 they could be kept internally and made available by the admin interface to HyperKitty or Postorius if we knew what statistics are desired. What do you want to see?
Also, did Mailman 2 already support LMTP and virtual domains or are those new?
LMTP, no, although I believe it was possible to fake it by talking LMTP to Mailman 2's incoming SMTP interface (they're nearly the same protocol). Mailman 3 *only* supports LMTP for incoming posts, delegating the hairy interaction with the Internet to its upstream MTA.
Virtual domains, yes, with the usually mild restriction that the same list address can't be used multiple times in different domains. Third-party patches to remove that restriction were available. In Mailman 3, that restriction has been removed.
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Stephen J. Turnbull