Re: [tlug] Mailinglist software

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Nguyen Vu Hung writes:

 > I only *use* ( I mean subsribes and receive/post emails to it ) fml
 > ( www.fml.org ) and find it it support Japanese and can make
 > archives. The nice things about fml are that we can control fml by
 > sending commands via emails to it, and get archives by sending
 > "get", "mget" commands, just like ftp.

This is mostly true of Mailman, as well.  We use fml here in my
institute, and basically it's an annoyance to the tech staff, because
there is no provision for list maintenance by subscribers beyond
subscription and unsubscription, and none at all for maintenance by
list owners.

Mailman allows subscribers to choose digest or not, if digest RFC 931
or MIME, you can suspend delivery but stay subscribed, you can tell
the list not to send you your own post, you can tell the list not to
send you posts where you are in the CC, you can select a preferred
language from among a dozen or so that provide translations of user
interface components.  It's not as powerful via mail commands as fml
or majordomo; most of this needs to be done via the web.

Mailman also has a very powerful web admin interface.

 > I don't know whether it supports Chinese, English, German, but you can
 > ask the authors.

Mailman supports all the above, and for German and Japanese I believe
there are translated templates for the web interfaces and mail
messages (ie, posts will have header/footer in the user's preferred
language, the web interface and password reminders will be in the
user's preferred language).

There is default provision for archives via the bundled "pipermail"
archiver, but there is active discussion about replacing it, possibly
with "lurker".