Hi Craig, this is a fantastic answer. I was mainly looking for these issues that majordomo supposedly handles and that would need to be handled in PHP.
Absolutely fantastic help. Kind Regards, Jochen Daum Chief Automation Officer Automatem Ltd Phone: 09 630 3425 Mobile: 021 567 853 Email: [email protected] Skype: jochendaum Website: www.automatem.co.nz On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:46 AM, Craig Anderson<[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi. > Majordomo is getting very old -- it was largely abandoned 10 years ago > when almost everyone switched to mailman and so it's essentially dead > and getting rather out of date. I ran a number of legacy mailing > lists on majordomo up until a few years ago, but switched to a custom > PHP code to do all the work. I had patched majordomo a number of > times to deal with 21st century email before abandoning it. With PHP, > the mailing lists could be easier tied into databases and workflows > and also be more easily hosted on small, inexpensive web hosts. > > You definitely don't want to bounce the entire message back to the > sender -- then you just become a relay for spammers -- they don't seem > to care if the top bit of the message says the email was bounced. > Bounce messages should only indicate that their email send to the list > failed. Are you sure majordomo doesn't do this when you set > restrict_post to the same file you're using for the mailing list? > > Main issues with mailing lists: > > 1) you need to ensure someone's "on holiday" autoreply won't trigger > an endless loop of autoreplies to the autoreply being sent to the > mailing-list. Majordomo's quite bad at this, largely due to it's age, > but you can patch it up with a regex or two ("out of office|out of the > office|Auto Response|on holiday|i am away"). Ditto for non-standard > undeliverable mail (e.g. subject contains "bounce" or "undeliverable > mail" or "X-Failed-Recipients" in the header) wrongly sent to list > (instead of the envelope sender which is set to an email address that > is monitored for bounced mail). There's a few headers you need to > look for as well as newer autoreplies use the same subject as the > original message (e.g. "X-Machine-Generated"). > > 2) About 10% of people have more than one email address they'll want > to post from. You'll invariably have to add the ability for users to > have more than one email address so that when access to the list is > restricted to members, they can post from more than one location (but > generally only get email at one address -- possibly configurable). > > 3) Access to lists needs to be restricted to list members or to > privileged members, otherwise spam and evil stuff will wind up on the > list. > > 4) You have to manage bounced mail (and suspend sending to addresses > where email bounces "too often"). Depending on the list's purpose, > someone may need to monitor the bouncing addresses so that the people > can be contacted and email addresses updated. > > 5) If you have multiple lists, you really need to have a solution that > (tries to) prevent email sent to multiple lists from being sent twice > to people on both lists. > > 6) You generally need to support announcement type lists (where you > don't munch the reply-to header) and group lists, where the reply-to > header is set to the list. > > 7) On many lists you want a footer explaining where to unsubscribe, > etc. Majordomo can't actually do this in a workable manner with MIME > email (it assumes all email is plain text). > > Now i wish i could point you to some nice open source PHP code for > doing all this. It seems most of the PHP mailing list projects have > much larger ambitions when what one really wants most of the time is > just a modern PHP replacement for majordomo :-) It's the zero > administration and tight integration with existing website membership > and facilities that i'm always seeking when incorporating mailing lists. > > It's probably about 100 lines of PHP code starting with PHPMailer and > PHPMailer-BMH to replace the most useful bits of majordomo (no one > uses email based commands any longer for list management, so you'd > already have those moved to PHP :-). On the other hand, if you > already have majordomo installed it'll take slightly less time to > configure it properly although you may eventually have to spend more > time patching it to fix problems... > > Sorry, lots of waffle but no solution... > -Craig > > On 10/06/2009, at 8:24 PM, Jochen Daum wrote: >> just trying to decide of how to run a mailing list with closed >> membership. Basically we want to allow only members of a database to >> send emails to the mailinglist, which is then distributed to all other >> members. >> >> The options are to use a php script and pipe the email into it or >> use majordomo. >> > > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ NZ PHP Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/nzphpug To post, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe, send email to [email protected] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
