# Mailing list software

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mailing-list-software/51807>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [January 7, 2006, 6:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mailing-list-software/51807 "2006-01-07T06:27:39Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Dan_Weinand)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2006, 6:27am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mailing-list-software/51807/1 "2006-01-07T06:27:39Z")

</div>

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

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Dan_Weinand)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2006, 12:39pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mailing-list-software/51807/2 "2006-01-07T12:39:24Z")

</div>

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? 🙂

Greetings,  
Gitte W.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/d/3da27b/32.png) [@Dan\_Weinand](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Dan_Weinand)\
**Post date:** [January 7, 2006, 8:00pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/mailing-list-software/51807/3 "2006-01-07T20:00:50Z")

</div>

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