Hello Mailman admins,

I recently configured an email and web server serving phpBB and Mailman to "bridge" email lists to phpBB forums. This includes managing attachments between the forums and email lists.

This works so well that I thought I would share.

It's really really really really really cool. Did I mention it was really cool?

It makes every email-list archive mechanism look foolish, imho, and it has the added benefit of taking all the phpBB posts and sending them to the email list as well. Among other things, this allows an existing phpBB-based community (and all of its discussion content) to transparently integration with a Mailman-based community...all while both sides not knowing that the other side was plugged in (other then seeing new discussion content/posts/emails from new users from "the other side")! No more segregation between forum-based and email-based communities talking about the same thing (or at least, the technical obstacles seem to now have been greatly lowered).

One can also import existing Mailman archives to a phpBB forum via Mail2Forum.

I realize there are references to Mail2Forum.com already in the GNU Mailman FAQ, but I thought it worth mentioning here again, given that I just got my "virtual domain" server running all this stuff, seemingly quite well. (However...it's a private server, behind an SSL "firewall", so I'm not inclined to open things up to a public demo/usage...yet.)

I have a placeholder info doc here:

http://www.mail2forum.com/wiki/index.php?page=Mail2Forum-phpBB-qmail-GNUMail...

One can also find lots more info here:

http://www.mail2forum.com/ http://www.mail2forum.com/forums/

A side note:

if you want to manage virtual domains on your server, then qmail's functionality far surpasses postfix's implementation. qmail's vpopmail is soooooo easy to manage (once you get the thing setup, of course), AND it has the .qmail files for STDIN content forwarding needed for the above stuff (unless you want to hack it with cron jobs), while postfix virtual domains setup takes much configuration with maps and even then can not support .forward/.qmail based stuff. I have both installed on my server and have tested them, and qmail is the clear winner.

Granted, the qmail architecture seems to be growing older and more antiquated every day, but until Postfix can get it's virtual-domain-management house in order, there's really no choice for me.

-Matt