SmartList is a computer software application for managing electronic mailing lists, which is built on top of Procmail, and is maintained by the Procmail developers.[1]
SmartList is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.
Currently, SmartList is used by some large software projects to maintain their mailing lists, including the Debian Project[2]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mailman_(GNU)
GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists.[4][5] Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Barry Warsaw. Mailman is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.[5]
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 Command line interface of Mailman | |
| Developer(s) | Barry Warsaw |
|---|---|
| Initial release | July 30, 1999[1] |
| Stable release | 2.1.15 / June 13, 2012; 7 months ago[2] |
| Preview release | 3.0b3 / December 31, 2012; 24 days ago[3] |
| Development status | Mature |
| Written in | Mostly Python, some C |
| Operating system | Unix-like |
| Available in | Many languages |
| Type | Mailing lists |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www.gnu.org/software/mailman/ |
Mailman runs on GNU/Linux and most Unix-like systems, and requires Python 2.1.3 or newer. It works with Unix style mail servers such asPostfix, Sendmail and qmail.
Features include:
- A Web browser interface for list administration, archiving of messages, spam filtering.
- A customizable home page for each mailing list.
- Integrated bounce detection and automatic handling of bouncing addresses.
- Integrated spam filters
- Majordomo-style email based commands.
- Multiple list owners and moderators.
- Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
- Support for virtual domains.
- Web based subscribing and unsubscribing. Users can temporarily disable their accounts, select email digest modes, hide their email addresses from other members, etc.
- Mailing list archiver (Pipermail, the name is visible in the URLs[7]) inside the mailing list manager.
but Python
Majordomo is a mailing list manager (MLM) developed by Brent Chapman of Great Circle Associates. It is written in Perl and works in conjunction with sendmail on UNIX and related operating systems. The name majordomo is derived from the Latin "major domus" meaning "master of the house"; in English, the word is used to refer to a large household's chief servant.[1][2]
The current version of Majordomo is 1.94.5, released Jan. 19, 2000[3] .
The official website warns that it will not work with Perl versions 5.001 and 5.005_01 specifically. It recommends to use Perl 4.036 or the latest version available. Support for Perl 4.036 may not be kept for the future.[4]
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ezmlm is a software package for managing electronic mailing lists by Daniel J. Bernstein. It is similar to GNU Mailman and Majordomo but only works with the qmail mail transfer agent. It is released into the public domain.
The latest version, 0.53, came out in 1997. The ezmlm-idx patches add modern features like MIME handling.
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| Developer(s) | Christophe Wolfhugel, Serge Aumont, Olivier Salaün, David Verdin |
|---|---|
| Initial release | November 1, 1997; 15 years ago |
| Stable release | 6.1.16 / November 16, 2012; 3 months ago |
| Development status | Mature |
| Written in | Perl, a little C |
| Operating system | Cross-platform |
| Available in | 20+ languages |
| Type | Electronic mailing lists |
| License | GNU General Public License |
| Website | www.sympa.org |
Sympa's features include bulk mailing, service messages and web pages defined by templates, subscriber information stored in a RDBMS, and an external antivirus plugin. Its web front-end offers a portal-like interface where the user can control all their list subscriptions and administrative powers in one place (i.e. one site per user, while Mailman, for example, creates one site per list).
Data is stored in a relational database such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, or Oracle; some configuration data is still held in text files, but the stated goal of the developers is to eventually hold as much configuration data as possible in the database as well.
Sympa consists of at least five concurrent daemons communicating through the database or by placing files in spools: a main daemon accepting incoming mail and controlling the other processes, a bounce daemon managing incoming bounces, an archiver archiving outgoing mail, a task manager doing scheduled maintenance and a bulk mailer doing the actual distributing of list messages to their recipients. The work of the main daemon can be split up into up to three parallel instances; of the bulk mailer, an arbitrary number of instances may be run in parallel. At least in theory, the bulk mailer processes can even be spread across a cluster of hosts. This architecture, combined with the use of a database table for buffering outgoing mail, makes Sympa well-suited for large and very large list environments handling millions of subscribers.
Other features are: (a full list of features is available on the Sympa web site.[1])
- high performance for huge lists ( > 700.000 subscribers)
- MIME-compatible
- data provisioning using LDAP, SQL or other data sources
- various authentication method (SSO, LDAP, X.509)
- benefit of S/MIME and DKIM
- internationalized
- web archive with access control, message removal, etc.
- multi-domain server designed for service providers.
- sophisticated automatic bounce management
- automatic service message and web interface customizable
- SOAP interface for integration with other applications
Managing Mailing Lists: Majordomo, LISTSERV, Listproc, and SmartList [Paperback]
Alan Schwartz (Author)Book Description
Would you like to set up an electronic discussion forum for your customers? Or how about a mailing list to announce meetings of your local hobby group? Email is the universal Internet application, which makes mailing lists an ideal vehicle for creating electronic communities. All you need to run a mailing list is access to a system that is connected to the Internet, a mailing list management software package, and a bit of know-how, which is where this book comes in. Managing Mailing Lists is full of practical information for the list maintainer and system administrator alike.
Mailing List History
The way most people keep up to date on network news is through subscription to a number of mail reflectors (also known as mail exploders). Mail reflectors are special electronic mailboxes which, when they receive a message, resend it to a list of other mailboxes. This in effect creates a discussion group on a particular topic. - E. Krol; The Hitchhikers Guide to the Internet; RFC 1118; Sept. 1989. |
Who invented mailing lists? Early forms of mailing lists were invented almost as soon as email was invented. It quickly became apparent that by combining several email addresses together into a single address, one email could be easily sent to a group of people in one action.
The first mailing lists carried on the ARPANET were based on the first email program SNDMSG. Some of the early and most popular mailing lists included the following:
- human-nets. Human factors and their relation to networks.
- network-hackers. Internet programming and protocol issues.
- sf-lovers. Science fiction literature.
- wine-tasters. Wine tasting.
Google Groups has some interesting historical logs of SF-lovers,human-nets, and other ARPANET mailing lists from the early 1980's. In fact, it was these lists that inspired Jim Ellis and Tom Truscott todevelop the Usenet to provide similar functionality for organizations that weren't connected to the ARPANET.
A version of mailing lists was also created on the BITNET network to enable thousands of researchers in organizations around the world to exchange information. BITNET also copied most of their mailing lists to the Usenet newsgroups.
For many years there have been three mailing list software applications that run most mailing lists (see more information at the linked pages):
- Listserv history. Originally conceived by Ira Fuchs and Dan Oberst and implemented by Ricky Hernandez to support BITNET lists. Revised version developed in 1986 by Eric Thomas.
- Majordomo history. First version written by Brent Chapman in about 20 hours. John Rouillard managed it for several versions, and it is now worked on by a free open source software group of developers across the Internet, and maintained by Chan Wilson.
- Listproc history. Listproc was originally developed for Unix computers by Anastasios Kotsikonas ("Tasos") at Boston University in the 1980's. It became very successful, and is now supported by the Corporation for Research and Educational Networking (CREN).
Historical applications. There have been many other types of mailing list management software developed over the years, including those listed below:
- Almanac
- BMW
- IDG
- Mailbase
- MReply
- SmartList
- Smof
- TULP
Mailing List Design - List Servers
A mailing list server reads your messages and copies them to everyone subscribed to the list.
Mailing lists are run by computer programs called list servers. Each list server is connected to the email system, and can send and receive email just like a person can, except a lot faster.
Each list server manages two email addresses associated with each mailing list:
- Server address. The server address is used to process administrative commands, such as list subscriptions and unsubscriptions.
- List address. The list address is used for the list itself. When the server receives an email sent to the list address, it automatically copies it to everyone currently subscribed to the list.
There are three main brands of mailing list servers in common use, described in later sections.
- Listserv. One of the most widely used list servers on theInternet, with a commercial version used by many large organizations.
- Majordomo. Widely used in its freeware version by community and small organizations.
- Listproc. Widely used primarily as a commercial product.
There are three general types of mailing lists, each with a different type of operation:
- Unmoderated. These allow any subscriber to send an email to the mailing list for distribution to all subscribers, in real-time without any pre-screening. Most lists are unmoderated.
- Moderated. These lists have a moderator, a human being that checks all email sent to the list to make sure it does not contain inappropriate content before the server distributes it to subscribers. There are more of these lists than there used to be because of problems with spam email, but they usually have fewer members and lower traffic, because it takes a lot of time for a moderator to read and check all of the incoming email on a high traffic list, so the size of a moderated list is somewhat self limiting.
- One-way. These lists are used to distribute information from a central source. Only one person or organization can send email to the list for distribution to all subscribers. These types of lists are often used by organizations to distribute information. There aren't many of these lists, but they often have a very great many members, in some cases hundreds of thousands. A typical example of a one-way list is NewsScan, which sends an email on developments in information technology to subscribers several times a week.
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