>Hi Everyone,
>
>Someone else may have already asked but I just joined this list as I am
>desperately looking for a new list server using Majordomo. Every list owner
>with Esosoft has been told that they have merged with Topica and all our lists
>will be moved within a week. Some people's lists have been moved within the
>day. Many of us don't want advertising and we are looking for a new server as
>soon as possible. We also don't want to loose the control over our lists as
>we have been handling our own Config files. We need something with digests
>and archives as well. We were paying $5.00 a month for our service with
>Esosoft but anything reasonable would be considered. Can any of you recommend
>a server which you are happy with? It would be greatly appreciated by many
>homeless lists.
For what it's worth you have my sympathy, and if I find a home for my
list, which has also just been swallowed by Topica, I'll let you know.
Topica does provide digests, though this is far from obvious.
Individual subscribers can switch to digest mode at the web site.
Topica also archives messages.
The ads on messages are currently trivial; they are just an ad for
the site itself.
I've been with Topica for a few days and my biggest objection is the
sheer time it takes to do anything with their foul and kludgy web
site. Clearly they *could* provide the kind of email interface we're
used to, but they choose not to, because they want to drive traffic
to their site and eyeballs for the banner ads there. I estimate it's
going to take me an extra couple of hours a month to run my list via
their site. At a sensible costing of my time, it would be cheaper to
pay typical ISP charges for a majordomo-hosted list.
That last point is the one I want to spread among the list-manager
community here: these web-based 'free' list services are far from
that, when you factor in the additional time it takes to hack through
web interfaces designed by clueless idiots instead of banging simple
commands at majordomo via email.
--
John Stevenson
Writer, editor, mountain bike bloke
