[Mailman-Developers] eSquire mailing list manager

[A.M. Kuchling]

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's
quite 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, some
users 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 closed
lists 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-related
lists)

    * You can create autoresponders.  This is really orthogonal to
mailing 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