[okfn-help] Does anyone like Mailman?

Tue May 17 15:35:47 UTC 2011

--On Dienstag, Mai 17, 2011 21:38:03 +1200 Tim McNamara 
<paperless at timmcnamara.co.nz> wrote:

>
> I've been chatting to Lucy about the intimidation factor of seeing
> several dozen mailing lists. I've been using GroupServer[0] with a few
> other groups and would like to recommend its adoption by OKFN. 
>
>
> "GroupServer has an email interface like Mailman, and a web interface
> like Google Groups, but it's GPL."[0] To get a sense of what it is like
> as a visitor, I recommend visiting the NZ open government ninjas mailing
> list[1].
>
>
> Its feature list[2] is actually much more complete than Google Groups.
> One of the features I like the best is how it handles files. Rather than
> sending attachments to everyone, it stores attachments on the server and
> sends recipients a link. This saves everyone bandwidth & there's a web
> accessible permanent location for every file if you ever need it later.

I'd also prefere GroupServer over Mailman a better ui is required. If
alone for it's foundation Zope with which I worked many years.

Another alternative is sympa [1][2]. I choose it as a mailman replacement
some years ago to get more features (mainly more options for mailinglists
and more than two administrative users per list). The web interface is not
as rich as GroupServer's from what I know about GroupServer, but richer
than  mailman's and translated. The backend has much more features.

If the main problem is the layout of mailman pages we can also try to
improve that with less work.
Even so mailman does not offer any customization story, we can change
mailman to provide a friendlier listinfo page [3], e.g. sorted into
categories, and a nicer layout. This may require some manual work
for new lists from time to time, but not too much.

A second option is to put a theming proxy ([4] or [5]) in front of mailman
that wrap the mailman output into an okfn layout, and write a better 
listing.

..Carsten

[1] http://sympa.org
[2] In action: <https://listes.cru.fr/sympa/home>
[3] <http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/>
[4] <http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Deliverance/0.4.2>
[5] <http://diazo.org/>