Mailing list software

Rails
1

For a project I’m working on I’m hoping to be able to have both
discussion and announce-only e-mail lists. Does anybody have any
recommendations about good existing mailing list apps that could be
integrated with a rails app?

Does anybody have any experience using ActionMailer as the basis for a
mass mailer? Does it perform well enough to make it feasible?

Thanks!

–
Dan Weinand

2

Dan Weinand wrote:

For a project I’m working on I’m hoping to be able to have both
discussion and announce-only e-mail lists. Does anybody have any
recommendations about good existing mailing list apps that could be
integrated with a rails app?

Does anybody have any experience using ActionMailer as the basis for a
mass mailer? Does it perform well enough to make it feasible?

My experience with various web frameworks/systems is that they almost
never handle mass mailing very well. My recommendations is to use
software for what it’s created for. So use web “software” (rails) for
web and use mailing list software for mailists.

Maybe it’s time for a rails interface to mailman or a mailman
implementation in ruby? :slight_smile:

Greetings,
Gitte W.

3

Mailman is certainly the standard for mailing list software but it sucks
in
so many ways.

It’s based on Python, which some might like but I’m not a fan.

It’s harder than shit to configure.

Worst thing is performance with large lists. It uses Python pickles as
its
persistence mechanism, which DO NOT scale at all. I have an announce
only
list with 450,000 members (fan club for rock band The Offspring) and the
only way to handle it is to do all kinds of crazy configuration crap.

My thoughts on Mailman… Supposedly v3 will fix it but I don’t know if
anyone is actually working on v3 or just talking about it.

A RoR based mailing list system that didn’t have MM’s problems could
probably dominate pretty easily.

Hunter