Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

Mailman Features

Here's a brief description of the new features in Mailman 2.1

• Through-the-web list creation and removal (with automatic support depending on the MTA)
• Multi-lingual support: list web pages and email notices can be in any of nearly two dozen supported language, configurable per-site, per-list, and per-user
• "Real name" support for members
• Much better password-less operation for simple user tasks.
• Support for personalized deliveries and VERP-like message delivery for foolproof bounce detection
• Emergency moderation
• MIME-based content filtering, with demime/stripmime like options
• Regular expression based topic filtering
• Better membership management, including searching
• Re-organized administrative requests pages
• Moderated newsgroup support
• A new architecture for the mail delivery subsystem, removing the dependence on cron, for better responsiveness and scalability
• New moderation and privacy controls
• Invitations
• Autoresponse governors
• Users can now change some of their delivery options globally, for all lists at a site, including their password, delivery status, real name, etc.
• Much better MIME and I18n support in the archiver
• A separate "list moderator" role has been added
• Urgent: header support (bypasses digests to reach all users immediately).

Here is a short summary of other features in Mailman. For details, please see the on-line documentation.

• Web based list administration for nearly all tasks, including list configuration, moderation (post approvals), management of user accounts.
• Web based subscribing and unsubscribing, and user configuration management. Users can temporarily disable their accounts, select digest modes, hide their email addresses from other members, etc.
• A customizable home page for each mailing list.
• Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
• Configurable (per-list and per-user) delivery mode
  • Regular (immediate) delivery
  • MIME digest
  • Plain (RFC 1153) digests
• Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework. Automatic disposition of bouncing addresses (disable, unsubscribe).
• Integrated spam filters
• Built-in web-based archiving, with hooks for external archivers such as MHonArc.
• Integrated Usenet gatewaying.
• Integrated auto-replies.
• Majordomo-style email based commands.
• Multiple list owners and moderators are possible.
• Support for virtual domains.
• Runs on GNU/Linux and most Unix-like systems, compatible with most web servers and browsers, and most SMTP servers. Requires Python 2.1.3 or newer.
• An extensible mail delivery pipeline.
• High-performance mail delivery, with a scalable architecture.

View all Mailman hosting plans here: Linux web hosting