I attended a local Linux user group meeting on Saturday, and one presentation was by the author of the eSquire mailing list manager.
The eSquire home page is at http://www.gamerz.net/eSquire/ . It'squite similar to Mailman in the capabilities that it supports; the major difference is that users only interact with it through e-mail, but administrators can do anything via the Web. In Mailman, subscribers can use the Web for setting their options, and some tasks, such as creating a new list, can only be done from the command line. (As a result, the code that creates new lists in eSquire needs to be setuid root in order to edit the aliases file.)
Features that might be of interest for Mailman:
* There are more classes of users. On a moderated list, someusers can be set to have their posts automatically approved. There's also a list of banned users, who can follow the list but can't post.
* Another list subscription policy: eSquire has open and closedlists as Mailman does, and adds a third level in-between, where any current subscriber can add new subscribers to the list.
* Unsubscribes can require approval (useful for work-relatedlists)
* You can create autoresponders. This is really orthogonal tomailing list handling, but you can create an autoresponder address which forwards any mail sent to it, and returns a response. For example, the author's e-mail is 'rrognlie', so he set up a forwarder for 'rognlie' to give people the correct address. At the moment the author is employed by Erols, a local ISP, and wrote eSquire for internal use. Soon he'll be changing jobs to work for Sendmail, Inc.
-- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/ Well, me whole family's musical, Jeffo... even the sewing machine's a Singer. -- John Constantine in HELLBLAZER #90
Features that might be of interest for Mailman: * There are more classes of users. On a moderated list, someusers can be set to have their posts automatically approved. There's also a list of banned users, who can follow the list but can't post.
You can do these things in Mailman, but it's more centralized. There is a listbox for each of these two things. Which do you think is more useful? Or both?
* Another list subscription policy: eSquire has open and closedlists as Mailman does, and adds a third level in-between, where any current subscriber can add new subscribers to the list.
Good idea.
* Unsubscribes can require approval (useful for work-relatedlists)
Good idea.
* You can create autoresponders. This is really orthogonal tomailing list handling, but you can create an autoresponder address which forwards any mail sent to it, and returns a response. For example, the author's e-mail is 'rrognlie', so he set up a forwarder for 'rognlie' to give people the correct address.
Is it as sophisticated as vacation? Ie, does it keep a database of who it's responded to recently to avoid mail loops, and the like?
So did you tell this guy about Mailman? What did he say?
John
John Viega writes:
Is it as sophisticated as vacation? Ie, does it keep a database of who it's responded to recently to avoid mail loops, and the like?
He didn't mention it doing so, so it probably doesn't doanything that fancy.
So did you tell this guy about Mailman? What did he say?
No, there wasn't much of a question period, and I didn't talkto him after the meeting.
-- A.M. Kuchling http://starship.skyport.net/crew/amk/ Get your head outta the clouds! Not you, kiddo. I was talking to Tiny. He gets his head in the clouds, he'll be sneezing for days. -- Mervyn Pumpkinhead, in SANDMAN: "The Castle"
participants (3)
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A.M. Kuchling -
Andrew M. Kuchling -
John Viega