Notes on mailing list software

by Gerald Oskoboiny

I'd like to find (or write) better mailing list software; all the packages I've seen so far seem to have major shortcomings. I know Majordomo and smartlist very well and have used each of them to administer anywhere from dozens to hundreds of lists for the past few years, but don't have much experience with others.

There are a number of specific features I would like that are missing from current mailing list managers.

Review of existing software

Here are some notes (mainly for my own use) on existing mailing list software that I have used or evaluated:

• sympa: seems fairly good; I tried installing it (sometime around spring 2000?) and it isn't quite as good as I thought (db schema is a little weird), but it seems to have promise.
• GNU Mailman:
  • Pros:
    • seems to be the favorite of most modern open source development projects (-> lots of attention, bugs should get noticed and fixed quickly, should have all the features you'd expect from a modern MLM)
  • Cons:
    • the archiver bundled with version 1.x (pipermail) has an awful bug in that the "downloadable" versions of the archives are not valid mbox files, so they can't be read with standard mbox-reading tools like mutt; only a few headers are present (no msgids or other useful headers). This is reportedly fixed in version 2.0, due to be released in Oct 2000.
    • I remember finding some other things that bugged me about version 1.x (I think I looked at the code and didn't like it for some reason), but I should take another look at a newer version.
• majordomo: internals/modularity sucks; human interface is quite good/evolved; Majordomo2 sounds like it might be better but doesn't have much of a user community yet
• smartlist: cons: incomprehensible, hard to hack/patch, not actively maintained; pros: fairly nice extension mechanism for installation- or archive-specific hacks (rc.local.s20 etc.)
• ezmlm: might be good if it can be disentangled from qmail and djb easily
• Listar sounds okay/good; haven't evaluated it carefully yet
• couriermlm of the courier MTA sounds pretty good
• LISTSERV: just plain bizarre. I recently (2000-10) joined a list run by listserv (version 1.8d), and the interface is identical to how I remember it being more than 10 years ago; these guys seem to have tried hard not to innovate in any useful way. Specific problems:
  • subscription confirmation process violates the HTTP protocol (uses GET when they should use POST)
  • emailed commands are replied to twice: once with a bizarre, useless "Output of your job" message that tells you how much CPU time it took to process your request, and another with the actual information you requested.
  • the standard "welcome to the list" message has its text justified on both the left and right, with a bunch of extra spaces in between words to make them line up on the right side. Where were they a few decades ago when everyone else realized that you shouldn't justify monospace text like that since it's harder to read?
  • no List- headers (RFC 2369)
  • emailed archive files are in a weird non-MIME, non-mbox format, and lack message-IDs for each message.
  • messages from the list aren't clearly marked as being from a daemon (no Precedence: header); none of the usual loop control headers are present (Delivered-To:, X-Loop:)
  • Reply-To's are munged (probably configurable per list, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's the default setting)
  • seems to enforce an 80-column limit on messages, by breaking long lines in half

Related

Not list software, but related stuff:

• the list-managers mailing list: good collection of list managers and occasionally some good discussion, but lots of big egos
• "Reply-To" Munging Considered Harmful (yeah! btw, subject munging is evil too)
• djb on Mail-Followup-To, etc.
• other mail-related stuff from djb
• jwz: Content-Length Considered Harmful
• jwz on message threading
• other related stuff from jwz
• Hugo on thread-breaking MUAs
• Harald's broken mail gateway pillory
• shibboleth: private mailing list manager
• Jakob Nielsen on mailing list usability
• SRC's postmaster pages
• for people who send unsub requests to the wrong place: Clueless Users Network Test System
• clues on viewing "full headers" in misc MUAs
• a guide on email quoting style
• my software page

Desired features

Desired features that are lacking from most current mailing list managers:

• store dist and accept lists in a database (in a relational way, not just storing flat text files in a db)
• flexible dist/accept policy setting
• pools of administrators/moderators
• automagic bounce handling using VERPs backed by postfix or qmail
• easily extensible like smartlist's rc.local.* files, to add hooks to archivers or whatever
• ability to moderate a new subscriber's posts for the first few posts (or first few days/weeks)
• when a message is bounced to the maintainer, (optionally) send a message back to the poster telling them what happened and why
• use Delivered-To: for loop control
• preserve all incoming Received: headers (cf. RFC 2505 sec. 2)
• use List- headers (RFCs 2369, 2919) in a sensible way, by default
• accept commands by email as well as web
• use GET and POST correctly in any web interfaces
• reject apparent duplicate messages, based on msgids and/or message bodies

Last modified: $Date: 2001/10/25 06:02:51 $
Gerald Oskoboiny, <gerald@impressive.net>