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From: Jim Dennis <jimd@mcafee.com>
Message-Id: <201006262156.OAA17044@mistery.mcafee.com>
Subject: Re: major domo or something els (fwd)
To: support@cdrom.com (Jamil Weatherbee)
Date: Sat, 26 Jun 110 14:56:04 -0700 (PDT)
Cc: questions@FreeBSD.org
In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSI.3.93.960625103313.8409K-100000@mother.cdrom.com> from "Jamil Weatherbee" at Jun 25, 96 10:33:22 am
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> 	Technical Support
> 	Walnut Creek CDROM
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Tue, 25 Jun 1996 06:16:12 -0500 (CDT)
> From: michael dorin <mike@chaski.com>
> To: support@cdrom.com
> Subject: major domo or something els
> 
> I have a new FreeBSD question I hope you can answer.
> I would like to have an automated list server, like majordomo.  
> I can't seam to get it to build.
> 
> Is there a mailing list problem on BSD already that I could
> be using? 

	I don't know about 'majordomo' under FreeBSD -- though I've built
	and installed it under Solaris and Linux.  I suspect that you'll 
	want to make sure that you have PERL 4.x installed (I don't think
	it's been updated for PERL 5).

	Personally I like SmartList much better (written by the author of
	the 'procmail' suite -- it is largely built over it).  It seems to
	cause less CPU load than majordomo -- and is reputed to have 
	much better bounce and exception handling than most other packages
	(although listproc or listserv may still have the edge for *really*
	big mailing lists).

	As examples of SmartList's exception handling:  

			When a pesky user sends subscribe/unsubscribe requests
			in their subject line and/or to the group rather than the
			"-request" address:

				Majordomo complains (in the first case) and 
				blithely passes it to the list (in the latter).

				SmartList just handles it (in the first case) and
				handles it *with a warning message* in the latter.

			I don't know how majordomo handles situations where
			it's host is rebooted while processing a message over
			a large list.  I've recently discovered that Smartlist
			keeps track and simply keeps going (I haven't even figured
			out how it's doing that yet).

	SmartList took me only about an hour to install and configure
	the first time I've used it.  Majordomo took about a day.  This may
	be an unfair comparison since I've learned quite a bit in the interim,
	and some of SmartList's configuration is very similar to Majordomo
	(especially the entries in the aliases file).

> Thanks,
> -Mike