[Mailman-Users] Bulk/ Announce question

[Jaco Lockhorst]

Every month we send out a dutch ezine with 30.000 subscribers
(www.smallzine.nl). We are currently using Lyris Listmanager (lyris.com) to
manage this bulk mailing. Actually we are paying a company that has a Lyris
license. We are considering to use Mailman, because it is cheaper and may be
better. I know there has been discussion about using Mailman for announcement
lists. I know how to set the 'Privacy Options'. However I have some additional
questions.

The advantage of Lyris is that it will try again to send the same message if
that initially fails and it seems sensible to retry. Lyris uses a built-in mail
server. It will try several times with for example an hour interval to deliver a
message. This means a provider with a temporary mailserverproblem does not
create a problem for the subscribers using that provider. They will only get
their ezine email a bit later.

>From the Mailman manual I learnt Mailman has good bounce handling options too.
However decisions to unsubscribe seem to be based on the number of days or
messages in sequence that were bounced. This is not effective for an ezine. Most
ezines only sent out one message per week/month and are serious about making
sure those few messages get delivered to all subscribers.

The second issue that concerns us is the list of subscribers. It would be a
disaster if spammers got this list with 30.000 subscribers. I think you need to
get root access to see the Mailman subscribers list. However, hackers do get
root access sometimes and it would be better if the list was also encrypted. As
ezines/announcementlists only send out a few messages it is no problem to type
the decryption password at these moments.

Maybe with a few additional features -as suggested above- Mailman can also help
the users in the announcement / ezine category. Finally we would like to know if
there are large ezines that use Mailman and how they like it.

Jaco