[Techtalk] Alternative ways to implement a mailing list...

[Kathryn Andersen]

On Wed, May 24, 2006 at 07:18:55PM +0200, Jason Landry wrote:
> My hosting plan -- provided by 1&1 in France -- is managed via a
> graphical web console. Am I pretty much at the mercy of my provider
> here? I don't see a way to define these "alias lists/mappings" in the
> gui console. But then why would they provide 2000 aliases?
> I'm *still*
> waiting on a response vis-a-vis from their support staff, btw. But
> what's your take, Tamara? Am I missing something in the gui console?

What often happens with web-hosting providers is that they only provide
the many-to-one kind of aliases, NOT the one-to-many kind of aliases.

> Or can we assume -- have you seen this practice before? -- that they
> offer shell access -- it's under Linux -- for "advanced" users or
> something, and that's where I'd be able to set everything up?

No, we can't assume that either: you would have to ask them if they
offer shell access.  Many web-hosting providers don't offer shell access
because they consider it a security risk.
Even if you had shell access, I'm not sure that you could set up aliases
from there -- it depends how they're doing the alias mechanism in the
first place.

Another thing you'll have to be wary of is spammers using your mailing
list to send spam to everyone on the list.  Which is another thing that
"proper" mailing list software takes care of, in preventing
non-subscribers from sending mail to the list, and, as another level of
security, one can set up approval of subscriber mail, to prevent
hit-and-run spammers (who join a mailing list just in order to send one
piece of spam before they're kicked off by the irate list manager).

You may simply be better off using one of the free mailing list
providers such as www.smartgroups.com or Yahoo.  I ran a smartgroups
mailing list until I got my own mail server and changed to MailMan.

Kathryn Andersen
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