[ntp:questions] Threading test

Brad Knowles brad at stop.mail-abuse.org
Fri Mar 18 00:58:00 UTC 2005


At 11:16 PM +0000 2005-03-17, Per Hedeland wrote:

>  If you can find another group with such a broken gateway setup, I guess
>  that could be considered an option - I've never come across one in 20+
>  years of using Usenet and running news servers, but admittely I frequent
>  a rather limited set of groups.

	Mailman is one of the most commonly used mailing list servers 
these days, and as the Gnu mailing list manager, it is the default 
amongst many Gnu-related projects.  It's also shipped by default by 
various commercial vendors -- one example would be Apple with MacOS X 
Server.

	Many of the largest FOSS projects (Gnu or otherwise) are using 
Mailman, including FreeBSD, SourceForge, and many others.  Many 
commercial vendors are also using it to host their own mailing lists, 
including lists.apple.com, Panic.com, etc....  Mailman mailing list 
hosting is also provided by many of the largest web/co-location 
hosting providers in the world, including pair.com, and many more 
shown at <http://www.python.org/moin/OtherCommercialHosts>.

	And these are just the ones I can pull off the top of my head. 
I'm sure that there's an infinitely larger number of sites out there 
that I don't know about.


	One of the reasons that Mailman is so popular is that it includes 
its own web archiving system, and its own USENET news gateway 
solution.  It doesn't offer a complete solution for all problems in 
existence, but it is the most complete out-of-the-box mailing list 
management system that I know of.

	It's also relatively easy to install and to get working with all 
the various components, even when you're 
building/installing/configuring from source as opposed to using a 
binary package or a port definition.

	This means that Mailman is probably the most commonly used 
mail-to-news gateway solution on the Internet today.


	Mailman is not the largest or fastest mailing list server in the 
world, but I am quite confident that it is the most commonly used, 
and I would be willing to bet that the aggregate amount of traffic 
served by all Mailman mailing list servers around the world is larger 
than any other mailing list server.

	Yes, Yahoo!Groups and GoogleGroups must have much larger volumes 
than any Mailman-hosted site has today, but put all Mailman-hosted 
sites together, and I don't think that any other mailing list 
management system can claim to handle more traffic.


	Now, if you haven't run into Mailman before, and/or you haven't 
previously run into mail-to-news bi-directional gatewaying as done by 
Mailman, I'm not sure that there's much more I can say.

	I will say this -- you've identified certain problems with the 
way the code works today.  Now, if you want to change this situation 
for the better, the easiest way to do that is to upload a patch that 
addresses all the problems that have been experienced in the past, 
while also addressing all the issues that you have identified with 
the current code.

-- 
Brad Knowles, <brad at stop.mail-abuse.org>

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

     -- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), reply of the Pennsylvania
     Assembly to the Governor, November 11, 1755

   SAGE member since 1995.  See <http://www.sage.org/> for more info.



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