Mailing List Manager

If you are looking for a lean, mean mailing list manager (MLM), look no further. The software you are looking for is called: the Minimalist. Despite the fact that the Minimalist is just a Perl script with a filesize of 70Kb, it is a full featured MLM which will satisfy almost all users. Do not expect to find any extra functionality in that script like web interfaces, email archivers, etc. The Minimalist has been designed to serve one purpose: manage mailing lists; that is supporting some commands which are sent to the program by email and taking the relevant actions upon their arrival. The mailing list archives can be converted to HTML pages by using one of the popular email archivers: MHonArc and HyperMail (there is also Pipermail which is included in the Mailman suite).

I’ve been experimenting with the Minimalist for the last days and all I can say is that this software Just Works™ … and I like it when software works! Actually, I liked it so much that I have devoted a significant amount of time in writing a program that acts as a bridge between the Minimalist’s mailing list archives and MHonArc. This program (a MHonArc wrapper actually), which also includes a set of resource files in order to heavily customize MHonArc’s HTML output (in an attempt to be like the popular Mailman web archives), is called BenzinArc (Benzin Archiver) and can be used both as a cron job and as a standalone application. BenzinArc is still work in progress. No code has been released yet. An overview of the HTML version of the CodeTRAX Mailing List Archives is available. Currently, only one read-only mailing list, codetrax-bugs, exists. This is a dedicated list to the bug reports of all projects hosted by CodeTRAX, but it is enough to serve as an example.

All this mailing-list-related stuff has kept me away from working on the 0.7.1 release of the TraxAuth Account System, but I assume all that was absolutely necessary. Although my free time will be very little in the upcoming weeks, I guess I will be able to release a new version of TraxAuth and the first public test release of BenzinArc.

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