On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 14:34:13 -0500 (EST) Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@civicnet.org> wrote:

I've been considering using mailman to replace majordomo. But... from my experiences so far in playing with mailman, and the traffic on this list, I'm getting the sense that the software is still immature and buggy.

"Immature" and "buggy" are subjective measurements. You are also seeing a fair bit of traffic from people running the current CVS version, or the latest patchset. It should be no surprise in an Open Source project that bugs happen at the bleeding edge where your users are your testers.

That all said, I have recommended and run mailMan as the list processor of choice at a number of companies with non-trivial mail rates both in volume (one averaged over 100,000 _inbound_ messages per day across all lists) and significance (eg Board of Directors list, Investors, etc). MailMan functioned quite well under that load.

Now, as for Majordomo....

What kinds of experiences can people share as to the reliability and robustness of mailman?

There remain performance problems with MailMan with high inbound mail rates to individual lists. This has been significantly improved, but remains an issue.

The internal archiving supports are best turned off.

I've never known it to lose a message.

Bounce handling is still a pain. Procmail/Maildrop is your friend.

Choice of MTA is significant. Avoid sendmail.

-- J C Lawrence Home: claw@kanga.nu ----------(*) Other: coder@kanga.nu --=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--