Hello. I manage an electronic discussion list (with about 1700 subscribers, which sends out about 60-80 messages or so a day to each) which is currently being run on CREN ListProc 8. Unfortunately, we need to be able to switch this mailing list to some sort of moderated arrangement, as the off-topic posting and flaming by newbies has become unmanageable. ListProc 8's "moderation" capabilities are frankly pathetic, and we're investigating other possibilities. I hope you don't mind but I have a few questions about MailMan's moderation capabilities (and a few other capabilities):

1. We would like to have a semi-moderated arrangement where the first post from a new subscriber (subscriptions will be completely open) will go to a moderator. If this post is approved, then this subscriber is added to a "pre-approve" list so that any further messages they send go directly to the list without passing through moderation. The attitude we are taking is that the regular posters on our mailing list don't cause problems, and we don't want their posts to be delayed by requiring moderator approval just to catch the few fools who happen to pop up. This is the same arrangement that many moderated Usenet discussions groups use (i.e. soc.sexuality.general, and others). Is it possible with MailMan?

2. How are multiple moderators handled with MailMan?

3. We would very much like for subscribers whose mail starts bouncing to be unsubscribed automatically. Can MailMan do automatic unsubscribing of addresses which become invalid?

4. We would like for "unsubscribe me" messages to be filtered out and not go to the list. Can MailMan reject messages based on whether they look like something that should have gone to the mailing list software rather than the list?

5. This is actually essential... We need for our mailing list software to send confirmation messages to people who request a subscription, so subscriptions can't be spoofed to harass an unsuspecting person. Can MailMan do this?

6. Can users switch freely from regular (single-message) to digest (one big message once a day) mode freely, and back again? Also, can we tack a message to the bottom of every digest telling people how to unsubscribe?

7. Will we see a speed advantage if we use qmail rather than sendmail, or is sendmail OK? I'm asking because I seem to remember that MailMan has some bulk mail features, and I don't know if this means it isn't necessary to switch to qmail for speed reasons. We're probably going to be running this setup on Linux and Apache, for whatever that's worth...

8. It would be great if the list software didn't fail to recognize a user just because the machine name directly following the @ in their e-mail address was added, deleted, or changed. Does MailMan handle this gracefully?

9. Can you protect user's privacy with MailMan by forbidding people other than the list owner from requesting a list of the e-mail addresses of all the subscribers?

10. Is it possible to create "anonymized" message archives automatically, by stripping out or anonymizing the "From:" field (and, ideally, any identical e-mail addresses that are found in the body of the message such as in the signature) before sending the message to the archive? I have never seen a feature like this in another MLM packge, but I thought I'd ask...

Any help anyone could provide would be greatly appreciated. Our second choice would be to hack MajorDomo so it will do all of these things, but it would be great if another free product (such as MailMan) met all of our needs right out of the box.

Sincerely,

Russell rdb@blarg.net