Frank Bonnet wrote:
We are moving our old LISTSERV server after 15 years of very good services :-) Lsoft prices have grown up amazingly so I plan to use open source software to replace it ... I would like to have feedbacks from lists managers that use Postfix we have approx 100 lists most of them are internals.
I'm in a similar context (40 lists, not 100, but mostly internal/closed - varying from very small to a couple of 1000 subscribers).
I've had pretty good luck with Sympa (www.sympa.org). Open source, developed and well supported by a consortium of French universities.
Too many years back, when I migrated from majordomo, the choices were basically Mailman and Sympa - and at the time Mailman seemed aimed mostly at people running small numbers of lists, while Sympa was designed specifically for university-scale enterprises with lots of lists. For example, as I recall, Mailman used to treat each list completely separately - while Sympa runs off a consolidated subscriber database. It looks like Mailman has evolved considerably since then, though.
Sympa has all the right functionality for an enterprise-scale operation, and has lots of hooks for customization of message formats, subscription approval processes, moderation, etc., etc. But.. it's also just a bit cumbersome to administer (too many tabs to wade through for some things). It's also just a bit tricky to get set up - particularly when wiring the pieces together (mail server, database, antivirus, antispam) - but not that much more than getting, say, postfix+amavisd+spamassassin+clam all wired up. I would recommend installing from source (perl, I think), rather than relying on packaged versions (at least on Debian, a few years back, the packages were always a couple of revs behind, never quite worked right, and were harder to "wire together" since they tend to put stuff in different places than the standard distribution).
Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In<fnord> practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
