[Mailman-Developers] commercial maillist system, lyris, looks rather similar

[J C Lawrence]

On Sat, 23 Jan 1999 12:59:12 -0500 (EST) 
Ken Manheimer<ken@digicool.com> wrote:

> I just heard mention of a commercial mailling list manager, lyris,
> that upon a tiny bit of investigation looks similar in some ways
> to mailman - eg, the admin interface layout:

Aye, and a very brag happy set of PR staff that rather got my dander 
up.

> (listinfo?), the orientation on web interfaces, "automatic error
> handling" (bounce handling), built-in archives, built-in mail
> engine (for "blinding speed"), etc. From poking around a little,
> it looks like they use perl at least as an extension language - i
> wonder how it's built.

Monolithic on top of an DBC-accessable database (C++ strongly
rumoured), runs its own SMTP server/MTA, all archive/message access
is via dynamic database queries, etc.

> I'm pretty curious how long it's been around - they claim that:

At least 4 years, probably more.

> 	"Lyris was the first email list server to offer a web
> interface for list administrators and members."

Utter codswhallop, but there's nobody with money to argue.

> 	No more "get me off this list!" messages.

> on the lyris "about" page (http://www.lyris.com/about.html), ,
> framed as "failsafe unsubscribing" - i think i saw this phrase in
> a recent mailman-users posting, i would not be surprised if the
> poster saw it there...)

They do this by posting a per-user unsubscribe address on EVERY
message (single message with optional unique MessageID per message)
sent to each subscriber.  Thus, for isntance, every message you get
from a Lyris based list will have a trailer ala:

  To unsuscribe from this list send a message to
  listname-unsubscribe-817689161263@domain

with the above text having a unique and different address (seemingly
random string of digits hashed from your subscription ID) for
everybody who receives the posting (yup, no RCPT TO bundling).  As a
member you then just email that address to unsubscribe.

-- 
J C Lawrence                              Internet: claw@kanga.nu
(Contractor)                             Internet: coder@kanga.nu
---------(*)                    Internet: claw@under.engr.sgi.com
...Honorary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...