Desperately Seeking a Sane Mailing List Manager

Sam Hart

2006-09-27 18:00:00

GNU Mailman : The CVS of Mailing List Managers

GNU Mailman is, in my humble opinion, the mailing list manager that comes the closest to what I'd like to see. It does a lot of things really well. However, it also has a lot of short comings. Additionally, there's some things I really wish it had. So let's take a look at the things it does well, the things it does poorly, and the things I wish it had:

What Mailman does well:

• Handle the actual mail stuff
  Delivery of the mail from a mailing list may seem straightforward, but it's not. You have nasty problems like bounces, duplicate posts, administrative requests, and RFC compliance to deal with. Mailman handles all this incredibly well.
  
• Advanced list configuration
  Mailman offers a lot of customization with respect to mailing list configuration. Like your mailing lists to munge reply-to headers (I know I do)? Mailman can do it. Prefer it to not munge the headers at all? Mailman doesn't have to. Mailman has oodles of privacy, list access policies, and other administrative options that can be tweaked.
  
• User subscription easy
  Most alternative mailing lists operate exclusively through silly email-based subscription and unsubscription. This isn't a problem when the mailing lists are used for discussions of some very technical FLOSS project, but when it is used more generally (especially by non-technical people) the use of arcane email-based commands can be a significant barrier for entry to the list.
  

What Mailman does poorly:

• Multiple list handling
  This has been a huge gripe of mine for a while. Every list you add is treated as a distinct and seperate entity. Each has different administrative interfaces, different logins, different user managements, different subscription methods. Sure you can host more than one mailing list, but when you have a user or administrator that has to work/deal with multiple lists on the same server, there becomes a lot of duplicated information and effort. Realistically, Mailman was designed to handle one mailing list, and all this additional list support seems kludged on after the fact.
  
• No native archiver other than the unsupported 'Pipermail'
  Last time I checked, Pipermail, the web-archiver that ships with Mailman, was unsupported by the Mailman crew. This may have changed, but I recall Mailman developers advising against its use. At any rate, Pipermail is simply unacceptable. No easy way to theme the pages, ancient HTML, no searching (sorry- telling my users to just "use Google" isn't an option). All of this may have been fine when Pipermail was first contributed in the stone age, but it just doesn't fly today. And "just install Mhonarc" or something else doesn't really solve the problem.
  
• Mailman can amplify spam, and create its own
  Without a doubt, this is my biggest gripe with Mailman. Even if you have messages from non-subscribers turned off, the mailing list administrator(s) gets every item of spam that makes its way to the mailing list in the form of an administrative request. If you don't have the request repeating turned off, you get reminders of this spam every day until you purge it from the queue. If you don't turn off most notifications, you wind up getting information about every bounce, every item undelivered, and tons of other administrative items. If you run one or two lists, you may be able to keep on top of this. However, if you run multiple lists for, say, a large cluster of hosted FLOSS projects, this means you can easily get hundreds if not thousands of junk mail per day just from Mailman.
  

Mailman Wishlist:

• Single sign-on across multiple lists
  A given Mailman system hosts 50 lists. I need to be subscribed to 25 of them. Having to sign-on as a different user across each list is a royal pain. If addy/username/password is available to one list, why can't it be available to others?
  
• Web forum to mailing list interface
  Let's say the searchable/themable/etc web archive problem was solved, and you found this neat threaded discussion on a mailing list you're not yet a part of, how do you join in? Currently you have to subscribe to the list, wait for that subscription to become active, quote the relevant text from the web archive, and create a new posting. This then has the nasty side effect of breaking up the thread (look up what the email header 'References" means if you don't get why). Wouldn't it be cool if, in addition to some single sign-on with the lists, you could reply to the original posting via a web interface using your single sign-on account as if you were replying to a web-forum posting?
  
• Integration with Drupal
  I've become something of a Drupal whore lately, but there is no denying that Drupal offers a great way to manage multiple "things" with a minimal amount of data duplication. One Drupal account on my site allows you to vote on polls, participate in forums, create Drupal books and stories, as well as create static pages and weblog entries. When faced with this sort of integration, you start wanting everything to integrate with it. Wouldn't it be cool if you could use your Drupal user information to sign up to mailing lists? Or if you could search mailing list archives alongside normal Drupal information? Or if you could treat mailing list archives like a Drupal forum and participate in discussions via a Drupal web-interface? Or if you could administer multiple mailing lists via a single Drupal admin interface?