[Mailman-Users] Features

Brad Knowles brad.knowles at skynet.be
Thu Feb 19 21:28:38 CET 2004


At 10:42 AM +0000 2004/02/19, Graham Moseley wrote:

>  We want to introduce a mailing system into our organisation which consists
>  of approximately 200,000 members. Can anyone confirm that mailman will be
>  capable of the following

	There are known Mailman installations with more than 200,000 
recipients, and I've heard of lists that had more than 400,000 
recipients.  These are large lists, and would need to have adequate 
resources given to their operation.  But if you give them enough of 
the right hardware, properly configured, this shouldn't be a problem.

>  1. Provide both one-way lists and broadcast lists with optional digests and
>  subscribe/unsubscribe - with flexible -per-list moderation control.

	Yup.

>  2. Programmable mailout control with programmable delays and scheduling

	You can achieve this with the facilities provided with your OS.

>  3. List import/export by text file and database with the ability to link to
>  a variety of databases

	I'm not sure what you mean.  Could you clarify?

>  4. Simple, remote access for moderators to add/remove/hold/modify users

	Yup.

>  5. Substitution to allow user info to be inserted into the lists

	To a degree, messages can be personalized.  However, this will 
hurt your performance, and for the size of list you're talking about, 
this may be a very serious issue.

>  6. HTML and plain emails

	Handling HTML e-mail is more complex than most people realize, 
especially when you start talking about taking HTML e-mail on input 
and then adding things to it before you send it back out again. 
Mailman largely deals with this issue by stripping HTML and 
converting it to text.

>  7. Ability to handle unlimited lists of unlimited size

	Unlimited lists of unlimited size?!?  There is not a single 
mailing list manager on the *PLANET* that can legitimately make 
*THAT* claim.

	If you need to be able to handle millions of users, your choices 
are going to be very, very limited, and they are going to be very, 
very expensive.  I'm not aware of any mailing list managers in the 
world that can go beyond these levels.

>  8. Straight forward pop3 in and smtp (with authentication option) out

	Mailman doesn't do POP3.  That's a POP server, an entirely 
unrelated program.  Try QPopper.  For SMTPAUTH, that would be handled 
by your MTA -- try sendmail or postfix.

	Mailman leaves the handling of other protocols to other programs, 
and focuses on dealing with the issues of managing mailing lists.

>  Most importantly it needs a simple to use interface and the scheduling must
>  not be done by command-line or multiple copies of program, but in the
>  environment.

	Mailman does not do this.  You can do scheduling outside of 
Mailman, with the facilities provided by your OS (if it is Unix or 
Unix-like), or through third party utilities (if you're on a 
Microsoft OS).

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad.knowles at skynet.be>

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
     -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania.

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