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[kiwiadmin]

So it would be great to have a discussion about what mailing list software we want to use.

Edit One

I have limited experience of Mailman. I’ve been poking around with the install we have on our server, which is bundled and intertwined with cPanel. I’m not sure if that causes problems. If someone with better experience of Mailman wants to poke around, I can give them admin permissions and so on.

Also if anyone has other options, let us know… There’s a lot of good software out there. Note that we are looking for free or cheap… 🙂

Here’s a list of things that I think about Mailman:

• Very capable.
• Over 15 years old in its current 2.x version
• Comes with cPanel
• Hosted on our server
• Any email address can join up.
• Lists can be created by any authorised email address on our server in a web interface
• There’s a v3.x which is much more modern. I suspect it would be a better option than 2.x
  • But I have been unable to figure out how to install it. It comes in about 5 different pieces, some of which use Python Django. And the instructions for installing are incredibly confusing. I suspect I’m missing some basic information about Django apps. And no, it doesn’t have an integrated installer. The closest I’ve found is a Docker install that should spin up a working version. But I have no experience with Docker beyond getting one Docker app to spin up and promptly fill 10GB of space with… something.
• I find Mailman hard to manage. But that may be my lack of experience. It’s certainly an imposing interface for users to suddenly encounter.

Here’s a list of things that I think about Google Groups:

• Hosted on Google servers.
• Any email address can join up, but list members need a Google account to allow them to control their own mails. Admins can do it for them if needed.
• Groups can be created by any authorised person via an easy to get to web interface.
• Groups can be nested inside each other. So Departments can have sub-groups of Areas and so on. Mail gets passed down hierarchically. I haven’t experimented with this, but based on a cursory reading of the docs, you can also set how the trickle down happens.
  • The significance of this is that we can have a STAFF group that simply contains all the other groups. You don’t have to administer people into a staff list, and a Department list and an area list.
  • I don’t know what happens when someone is in multiple places and an email trickles down. I would HOPE that you only receive it once. But I have not experimented.
• Groups can be used for permissions into various parts of Google Suites. For instance, setting permissions on who can edit Sites and so on. In this way its a simple permissions system. This would allow pretty easy access for users to use a Site as a Wiki.
• It’s easy to see what groups you belong to by logging into your Google account.

The nested groups, and the permissions are the most compelling reason to use Google Groups.

That’s what I have at the moment. Note that my thoughts may be incorrect. By all means pipe up if that’s the case.

Please post back your thoughts. Likes and dislikes about these systems.

 

• This topic was modified 7 years ago by kiwiadmin.

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