[Mailman-Users] MailMan product question

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

David Scarborough writes:

 > Does Mailman manage lists with contact name AND email address?  I
 > could not tell easily from the product information.

Mostly, yes.  It is possible to associate a full name with an email
address in a Mailman list.  For example, when doing a "mass subscribe"
you can enter subscriber information in the form

    J. Valued Member <j.v.member at his.place.net>

and both the name and the address are displayed in the membership list
interface.  It is also possible to enter the name into the membership
in various other ways, and I believe that Mailman will pick out the
name from the "From" header field in by-email subscriptions, if it is
present.

However, name information is "second class": subscribers are ordered
by address, not by name.  Getting access to a list sorted by name is
not terribly hard if you have any system admin experience at all, but
it's not yet trivial, and it does require direct login access to the
Mailman host, with appropriate level of privilege.  Also, there is no
way to enforce entry of a name with new subscriber's address.

Mailman 3 will make fulfilling this kind of requirement much easier,
but it's still several months from being production-ready.