Thoughts on Mailman v3

[kuemerle5]

Although I don't use Mailman myself, I have a friend who needs the functionality that it offers, so this is sort of my first real exposure to it (read: no flaming on the n00b ). As I'm sure most people who use Mailman v2 right now are aware; the design of it is quite clunky, not very aesthetically pleasing, and has a steep learning curve. I took a walk around their wiki yesterday and saw mentions of v3 (in the making for quite sometime now [2006?]. I apologize if I'm completely out of the loop here) so I decided to see what kind of changes were going into said version. And I'm not going to lie; the new/planned interface is sick. It's at least 50x better than v2. I guess there's going to be many new features as well. I'll list some of the ones that seem coolest to me:

1. Obviously, the new interface
2. Better archival features (including theming)
3. RSS feeds
4. RESTful API (I saw this on the site somewhere, but I'm not sure if it will even be included in v3. Seemed almost like a prof-of-concept when I was reading the entry on it.)

Your thoughts on Mailman v3? I think it's going to be pretty legit. Hopefully, it gets released soon!

[fshagan]

I have one customer using it on my VPS, and its basically a resource hog. There's quite a bit of overhead for what you get from it. If I had it to do all over again, I wouldn't offer it to my customers.

 

It currently doesn't allow timing or grouping of emails, so its like opening a fire hose when you click "send". Rather than interface improvements, having some finer control on how the script works would be helpful.

 

All of my other customers have switched to either Constant Contact or MailChimp for their newsletter needs. MailChimp allows up to 2,000 email addresses free, with up to 6,000 "sends" on the free account (so you can send three newsletters to all 2000 subscribers each month). And, if one of those people complain, you don't get your server on a blacklist.