[Mailman-Users] How does Mailman compare with YahooGroups?

[texas critter]

prodos at prodos.com wrote:

> Or, if you are an ex-YahooGroups user, say why you changed
> to Mailman?

Because Mailman *works*.  Any large free service is bound to have a level
of unreliability and with Mailman, I have reliability, fast delivery of
emails, the ability to save the archives all in one plain text mbox file to
my local hard drive.

I never use the web features of Yahoogroups much, I mainly run mailing
lists.  And with v2.1, Mailman has the most important features of
Yahoogroups, moderating new members, moderating individual members,
stripping html and/or attachments and searching the member list.

And there's no advertising! :)  And less spam on my own domains than at
Yahoogroups.

> I've been using YahooGroups (previously eGroups) for my various
> discussion and bulletin lists for years. I think they are very good.
> But I'm now looking around for alternatives.

I still run some Yahoogroups and in some cases, I have duplicate lists,
people can choose to join the YG group or the Mailman list.  But I still
prefer my Mailman lists over Yahoogroups.  Yahoogroups is free, but you get
what you pay for, so I expect it to not work reliably and to break from
time to time (and Yahoo usually fulfills my expectations ;)).  But my
Mailman lists just keep going like the energizer bunny.

Since I moved to my own server, I'm discovering all the things I can do
with root access to Mailman.

If you like and use the Yahoogroups web features, you might find bulletin
boards/forums like PhpBB or Invision boards to be an easier transition,
it's web based but boards can send email notices of new posts in threads or
boards so that keeps people involved and checking in at the website.

It all depends on what your lists and the membership use and like the most.

(and I loved eGroups and Onelist before that, I still miss them!  and the
great people that used to work there before Yahoo chased them all away.)

> And what about Majordomo? How does that compare with Mailman?

I haven't used Majordomo in years but I happened to look at the Majordomo
site recently, v1 (which I used at one time for a couple years) is straight
mailing lists, all admin is thru email commands, no web interface, no
archives.

v2 is supposed to really good and with the MajorCool web interface, similar
to Mailman v2.  But from what I could see, there's not a lot of development
going on with Majordomo.  I prefer using something that is still being
developed and improved.

hth,
texas critter

--
EL-M FAQ: http://www.emaillist-managers.com/