[lug] Distributed e-mail lists

[Michael Deck]

At 11:02 AM 5/3/01 -0600, you wrote:
>I'm looking for a distributed e-mail list (with support for parallel 
>mirrors) for a high volume list.  It needs to support Linux and 
>centralized subscription management.  What we need is basically a system 
>that delegates portions of the subscriber list to different MTA's 
>transparently and queues outgoing mail in parallel.
>
>So far, I've seen ezmlm-idx w/ qmail.  Any other open source solutions out 
>there?
>
>-John

I've used both ezmlm and MailMan and I like the latter a lot better. 
However, the installation of ezmlm is about 20x easier. Mailman's install 
(at least for me) took forever with a lot of re-installations, hacking, and 
trial-and-error. I found the file-protection scheme hard to figure out. But 
once it was installed it seemed to be much easier to manage since you do 
all the management from web pages rather than from command line. This also 
makes it possible to administer remotely, which I find useful. Also, 
instead of cryptic email-addresses like 
boulder-acm-list-subscribe-deckm=acm.org at cleansoft.net, you navigate to the 
list's web page and enter your subscription info. This makes it especially 
useful when you have the case where most of your subscribers find out about 
the existence of the list from a web page that you can link to the list's 
page.

On the whole I'm happy with MailMan though from the number of 
queries/complaints about the install and protection issues on the support 
list, I'd say it's due for some improvement.

-Mike

Michael Deck
Cleanroom Software Engineering, Inc.