Sendmail, 3rd Edition

Packages That Help

As the number and size of mailing lists at your site become large, you might wish to install a software package that automates list management. We show four of the more mature packages here. Many other packages exist (some good, many immature), and you can find them by searching the Web.

Majordomo

The Majordomo mailing-list management software was originally written by Brent Chapman using the perl(1) language. Its chief features are that it allows users to subscribe to and remove themselves from lists without list manager intervention and that it allows list managers to manage lists remotely. In addition, users can obtain help and list descriptions with simple mail requests. Note that Majordomo aids in managing a list (the list addresses) but does not aid in list moderation (the contents of mail messages). But Majordomo does catch administrative mail erroneously sent to the list as whole. Majordomo is available via anonymous FTP from ftp://FTP.GreatCircle.COM/pub/majordomo/.

Mailman

The Mailman mailing-list management software was written and is distributed as part of the GNU project. It claims to be fully web-based for ease of management. Even list managers can manage lists entirely over the Web. Mailman is written in Python (with some C code for security). The Mailman package is available from http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html.

ListProcessor

The ListProcessor system was written by Tasos Kotsikonas. It is an automated system for managing mailing lists ...