UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [332]
Mailman was inspired by its authors’ use of Majordomo and their frustration with bounce errors, tricky configuration of advanced features such as digests and moderated lists, and performance difficulties with bulk mailings. Mailman provides a script that imports Majordomo lists. It also has some ability to detect and control spam.
Mailman’s big claim to fame is its web interface, which makes it easy for the moderator or postmaster to manage a list and also easy for users to subscribe, unsubscribe, and configure their options.
ListProc
ListProc is an old-timer in mailing list management software. It was written in 1991 by Anastasios Kotsikonas and maintained until about 1994. It then lay idle for a few years but has recently been resurrected with a new beta release in 1998. It used to be available from the computer science department at Boston University for free, but with slightly strange licensing rules. Now it is available from www.cren.net for a hefty licensing fee ($2,000 per copy, even for universities). Forget ListProc and go with one of the free, open source packages.
SmartList
SmartList was originally written by Stephen R. van den Berg, who is also the author of the procmail package. SmartList is available from ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de or www.mindwell.com/smartlist. It uses procmail, so you will need to download both procmail.tar.gz and SmartList.tar.gz.
SmartList is small and simple. It’s a combination of C code, procmail rules, and shell scripts. Bounces, the maintenance headache of mailing lists, are automatically dealt with by the software. Users are automatically removed from a list after a certain number of bounces to their address. SmartList requires a login entry in the passwd file (“smart” or perhaps “list”) that is a trusted user in sendmail’s configuration file.
The installation includes led, a lock wrapper for editing that tries to protect SmartList against being left with an incoherent, partially edited configuration file.
LISTSERV Lite
LISTSERV Lite by Eric Thomas is a crippled version of LISTSERV, the commercial product from L-Soft International, Inc. Some of the features of the real version are missing, and the software is limited to managing 10 mailing lists of up to 500 people. LISTSERV Lite needs to run as the pseudo-user listserv, which must own its files. It also likes to have a listserv group. LISTSERV Lite provides a web interface both for subscribing to a list and for maintaining it.
The distribution is available from www.lsoft.com. Source code is not distributed, but precompiled binaries and stubs for many versions of UNIX and Linux are provided. If you already are familiar with LISTSERV and have lists that use it, you might be able to justify running a binary-only, crippled list manager. If you’re starting from scratch, choose one of the open source, unrestricted alternatives mentioned above.
LDAP: the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol
LDAP is a protocol that provides access to a generic administrative directory service. It has been around for a few years, but it has just recently started to become popular.
Administrators have discovered that LDAP is good for almost everything:
• sendmail configuration: aliases, virtual domains, and mail homes
• User management: login names, passwords, hosts (e.g., Stanford University)
• Administrative config files (e.g., SuSE Linux)
• As a replacement for NIS
• As a calendar server
• For use with Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)
It’s envisioned that LDAP will eventually become a global directory system used for many different purposes.
LDAP grew out of the ISO protocols and the X.500 mail system. That heritage immediately suggests complex, bloated, verbose, bad, etc., but the L in LDAP is supposed to take care of all that. Protocol versions 1 and 2 have been standardized.