big mailing lists / slashdotable hosting

Seth Cohn sethcohn at gnuhampshire.org
Fri Mar 30 14:57:49 EDT 2007


> Can you expound upon the differences, pros/cons, etc. of phplist
> vs. mailman (or any other) mlm?

Mailman, ezmlm, yahoogroups, etc, are all many to many  mailing list programs.
While there might be moderation, the idea is any (or at least a select
few) of your members, will send messages, and so there is an address
assigned to.  It's possible to limit who can send, so it's possible to
turn "many to" into "one/few to", but that's much along the same path
as using a screwdriver as a hammer.  Wrong tool for the job.
Sending out to a 10K (or 100K) member mailing list will take hours,
and what about tracking who got the mail, if perhaps you want to
adjust the message after it's gone out to half the list because of a
typoed url (for example)?

Enter PHPList, a one/few to many mailing list. It's not meant for
discussions, it's meant for promotion/newsletter/communication.  It's
meant to make html easier (graphics/links), allow tracking, allow
double opt-in and easy unsubbing, etc.

>  I'm not asking you to reveal the
> entirety of the presentation that Ben's about to ask you for ;) But a
> quick, basic overview would be welcome if you don't mind.

Since I'm already in the queue to give a Drupal presentation in just
under 2 weeks, a full PhpList presentation will have to wait...

> >> think, but quite expensive per bit.  in-house has advantages as I can
> >> do things like rate-limiting to reduce the load, but:
> >
> > phplist will do that, in a variety of ways.
>
> Can you explain?  Is this different than bandwidth limiting and/or
> traffic shaping?

Yes, different than both.  Those are lower level limits (ie
wire-level).  PHPList does mailer-level limiting...  For example, you
can limit how many emails go out within X amount of time (to avoid
loading the server down)  Or You can limit how many emails go to any
domain  at a time, (ie spread out your AOL, gmail, yahoo mail so it
only sends X at once to them, and doesn't flood them at all once
(looking more like spam to them, for example)


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