[Mailman-Users] (OT) Newbie with recurring frustrations!

[William Yardley]

On Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 02:14:02AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Brandon Sussman writes:

> > I have had good luck so far with Dreamhost's Mailman support - they
> > have some folks who seem to care and know Mailman fairly well.

> That's interesting, considering that there was some hair-pulling over
> on mailman-devel about possible problems with Dreamhost.  (Totally
> unsupported by facts, I'll add; the poster just wanted to justify a
> hare-brained scheme with claims that his hosting service, which was a
> birthday present or something, *might be* unreliable.)

I used to work there and was somewhat involved with the early mailman
implementations there.... I'll say a few things:

1) Virtual domains are (AFAIK) still supported with lists being named
listname-example.com at lists.example.com - even if you alias
listname at example.com or something to it, you can't fully get rid of the
slightly ugly addresses. That's mostly due to limitations of Mailman (at
least at the time we implemented things, though there may be some
creative ways to get this to work now).

2) Since Mailman is hosted on central machines, and isn't one install
per account, there's no easy way to give users direct access to command
line commands, though I think their support team will be pretty
responsive for occasional or one-time requests to do stuff on users'
behalf.

3) Since Mailman is a shared service, there's obviously a limit to the
size of list that can reasonably be handled on this type of service,
though there aren't any hard limits that I know of, and I believe some
very large lists are being hosted here.

4) I will agree that they have some staff who know Mailman pretty well.
I don't know who all is working on it now, but I do know that one of the
founders, Dallas, has done a lot of work with the Mailman implementation
there, and I believe at least one other developer they have there is
also doing a good amount of work with supporting their Mailman installs.
Overall, they've got a very smart bunch of people.

5) DH has grown a lot in the past 3-4 years, and definitely there are
some technically-savvy folks who aren't always able to get the same
level of support they used to get. That said, I think they are better
than many / most hosts out there, and do have pretty good support for
hosting Mailman lists. Whatever one can say about the reliabilty of
their hosting services (and there are a range of opinions here), I think
the Mailman service should be pretty robust and reliable.

(Side note to the person who was posting about a non-profit - DH does
have a 90 day guarantee and *free* hosting for non-profits with
501(c)(3) or tax exempt non-profit status, so maybe at least worth a
try. Saying this as a former employee with no financial interest in the
company.)

w