[Mailman-Users] maturity of mailman?

[claw at kanga.nu]

On Tue, 30 Nov 1999 14:34:13 -0500 (EST) 
Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at 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 at kanga.nu
----------(*)                              Other: coder at kanga.nu
--=| A man is as sane as he is dangerous to his environment |=--