[thelist] web based mailing list manager

Gary Pupurs garyp at speakeasy.net
Mon Mar 5 12:15:44 CST 2001


> I think the mailman MLM is a real nice piece of software.. Ever since
> its 2.0 release a couple months back, its been leading the pack.. Much

We currently use Majordomo, set so people have to respond with the 'auth'
request to get added to the list. (An attempt to prevent all the bounced
mail from badly typed addresses.)  Only problem is that the authorization
messages are so cryptic that only a code author could love them; they
require the user to cut and paste the auth code (or remove leading >'s from
the message).

We recently discovered that 40%(!) of the people who signed up for one of
our listserves never responded to the auth request, and didn't get
subscribed.  So I went investigating other MLM packages for one that just
says 'respond to this message to subscribe'.

I like Mailman, especially the build in web admin features, but our network
admin doesn't want to use it because it uses Python, which "is a security
risk since it's not as well tested as Perl, so you'll have to find a Perl
script to do the job if you don't like majordomo" (in his words).  This
seems a little off to me, since Zope is Python-based and some major sites
are using both Zope and Mailman.

Does anyone know of a web security comparison between Perl and Python?  Or
have some info or links to back up my case on this one?

-g






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