[Mailman-Users] Mailman vs Sympa

[Richard Barrett]

On Thursday, October 9, 2003, at 10:08  am, Gary C. New wrote:

> I've been looking into implementing a mailing list package and I think  
> I've narrowed them down to mailman or sympa.
>
> I have a few questions regarding mailman and hope to find some answers  
> here.
>
> 1.  What mail archiving software is recommend for use with mailman and  
> how difficult would it be to drop into a template?
>

Mailman has its own built-in/integrated archiver: pipermail. Not  
perfect but quite adequate for many list's needs. In MM 2.1.x,  
templates for archive page generation can be readily tailored for site,  
virtual host and specific list needs.

As a companion to pipermail, you can use MHonArc or any other HTML  
generating archiver of your choice in a  loosely coupled fashion.

I have published on sourceforge, a patch for MM 2.1.3 which tightly  
integrates MHonArc with MM/pipermail and allows, amongst other things,  
per-list choice of pipermail or MHonArc for HTML archive index and  
message page generation, with pipermail providing top level control of  
archiving. The patch is currently available here:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/ 
?func=detail&aid=820723&group_id=103&atid=300103

http://www.openinfo.co.uk/mailman/patches/mhonarc/index.html

> 2.  What is the recommended search tool to use with mailman, other  
> than htdig?
>

The only tightly integrated search engine for MM is currently htdig,  
using patches published on sourceforge. For an example of its use visit  
the following URL, although this is running MM 2.0.13, a fairly old  
verion of MM and the htdig integration patch

http://dotgnu.org/pipermail/developers/

If all your lists a public then you can configure the search engine of  
your choice to index the archive HTML pages. Take a look at the  
following FAQ page for more info:

http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=show&file=faq01.011.htp

> I would prefer using mailman, but sympa's integrated mail archiving  
> and search functions are a great incentive (I do like sf's  
> implementation of mailman and might consider it if its source was  
> available to the community).
>

If I understand it right, Sympa also uses MHonArc for generating HTML  
archive pages.

> Thank you for your assistance.
>
> Respectfully,
>
>
> Gary