Mailman

mailman

Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager

Mailman is free Open Source software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

Mailman Features

  • Through-the-web list creation and removal (with automatic support depending on the MTA)
  • Multi-lingual support: list web pages and email notices can be in any of nearly two dozen supported language, configurable per-site, per-list, and per-user
  • “Real name” support for members
  • Much better password-less operation for simple user tasks.
  • Support for personalized deliveries and VERP-like message delivery for foolproof bounce detection
  • Emergency moderation
  • MIME-based content filtering, with demime/stripmime like options
  • Regular expression based topic filtering
  • Better membership management, including searching
  • Re-organized administrative requests pages
  • Moderated newsgroup support
  • A new architecture for the mail delivery subsystem, removing the dependence on cron, for better responsiveness and scalability
  • New moderation and privacy controls
  • Invitations
  • Autoresponse governors
  • Users can now change some of their delivery options globally, for all lists at a site, including their password, delivery status, real name, etc.
  • Much better MIME and I18n support in the archiver
  • A separate “list moderator” role has been added
  • Urgent: header support (bypasses digests to reach all users immediately).

Other features in Mailman.

  • Web based list administration for nearly all tasks, including list configuration, moderation (post approvals), management of user accounts.
  • Web based subscribing and unsubscribing, and user configuration management. Users can temporarily disable their accounts, select digest modes, hide their email addresses from other members, etc.
  • A customizable home page for each mailing list.
  • Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
  • Configurable (per-list and per-user) delivery mode
  • Regular (immediate) delivery
  • MIME digest
  • Plain (RFC 1153) digests
  • Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework. Automatic disposition of bouncing addresses (disable, unsubscribe).
  • Integrated spam filters
  • Built-in web-based archiving, with hooks for external archivers such as MHonArc.
  • Integrated Usenet gatewaying.
  • Integrated auto-replies.
  • Majordomo-style email based commands.
  • Multiple list owners and moderators are possible.
  • Support for virtual domains.
  • Runs on GNU/Linux and most Un*x-like systems, compatible with most web servers and browsers, and most SMTP servers. Requires Python 2.1.3 or newer.
  • An extensible mail delivery pipeline.
  • High-performance mail delivery, with a scalable architecture.