[Mailman-Users] Seeking Email Client Recommendation - Specific use scenario

[Drew Tenenholz]

All --

I know that Mailman is intended to be more or 
less sender agnostic, however, I would like your 
recommendations for email client software that 
will suit my specific needs and still play well 
with Mailman (announce-only lists).

(preferably version 2.1.9, or whatever the folks 
over at Red Hat linux are approving these 
days...that's another story.  I have a 
development server that is currently on the 
standard distribution of 2.1.12, and am happy to 
move up at any time, but the collaborators are 
sticking to Red Hat's release.)


Here are my specific client software needs:

1) a cross-platform client (Mac & Windows; Mac 
10.5 & up, Windows XP & Windows 7)
2) capable of sending "plain-text" messages (see below)
3) capable of sending to mailman in many 
languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish, 
Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Chineese), 
without munging the characters such that they 
come out incorrectly in the list messages
4) reasonably simple to configure and maintain 
for a user base of 10-40 users located all over 
the world
5) capable of off-line message creation (so not 
solely web-mail based solutions)

Any suggestions from folks experienced with a 
specific email client and Mailman are greatly 
appreciated.

Sincerely,
Drew Tenenholz


Read on if you like too much detail.....

I work part-time for a non-profit which has a 
subscriber base of about 50,000-60,000 across a 
number of lists.  Some lists are still being 
faithfully served by majordomo, but growth is 
forcing us to move on to a list-serve that can 
handle the languages mentioned above (and with 
more growth more languages are likely).  Russian 
(Cyrillic) was the first real hurdle, and since 
I've gotten that to work (Mailman 2.1.12), we've 
started playing around with French (Mailman 
2.1.9), which one would think is simpler...but is 
not turning out to be so.

One thing I'm seeing is that French accents sent 
from MS-Entourage (Mac version of Outlook) end up 
with surrounding spaces in the SUBJECT LINE ONLY 
( e.g. pand é mique instead of pandémique) while 
my very old & trusty Eudora 6.2.4 has absolutely 
no problems with the same text; go figure!

The business rules for the organization state that mailing list mail MUST:
1) Be in 'plain'-text, not rich text, HTML, etc. 
(But obviously, needing non-ASCII characters 
means some updated character allowances are 
required.)
2) NEVER contain attachments of any sort
3) NOT contain personal signatures or signatures 
added by corporate/governmental/education server 
like "This communication was sent to me at me.com 
and is intended only for that recipient, if you 
are them, don't read this message...."

The goal is to send to people all over the world 
(we're sending to 196 countries right now) in a 
way that readers in New York and the African bush 
can all read that same message and not need a 
very fancy computer setup or lots of bandwidth to 
receive.

They've been 'standardized' on Eudora for a lot 
of years, but the Russians don't use it, and 
anyway it can't be installed on Windows 7.  So, 
it is time to change, and I'm hoping to find 
something that I can help all of my list posters.

It would be helpful if this email client had a 
setting to NOT line-wrap messages, there is this 
whole long editing and proofing process before 
sending out the announcement (all managed by a 
closed [soon to be Mailman] list), and 
line-wrapping becomes a real PITA.

Our allowed posters are happy to use what I tell 
them to (more or less), and they don't need a 
single email client for all of their email 
accounts; in fact sometimes it is better if they 
use one client for messages related to this 
organization and a different client for any other 
accounts.

The off-line message creation is necessary 
because frankly we have people who a are off the 
grid a lot (either travelling or in places 
without any meaningful internet access).  Also, 
the posts require a good deal of thought, 
formatting, and correction.  Having a tiny little 
composition window is just not going to cut it. 
What some people do now is literally that: 'cut' 
from the email application, 'paste' into MS-Word 
for corrections, then cut/paste back into email & 
send. (Talk about your encoding glitches....)

Any suggestions from folks experienced with a 
specific email client and Mailman are greatly 
appreciated.

Sincerely,
Drew Tenenholz