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+Title: Mailman Considered Beneficial
+Author: Barry Warsaw
+Author-email: barry@python.org
+Links: links.h rant-links.h
+
+<h3>Mailman Considered Beneficial</h3>
+
+Jamie Zawinski posted an article in 2002 titled <a
+href="http://www.jwz.org/doc/mailman.html">Mailman Considered
+Harmful</a>.  I know Jamie and respect him, but I respectfully
+disagree with his assessment.  You'd be worried if I didn't, eh?
+
+<p>To give Jamie the benefit of the doubt, I believe he was reviewing
+older versions of the Mailman software, where some of his complaints
+may have been appropriate.  Here is a rebuttal to his
+article, based on
+<a href="http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=103">the
+latest stable release of Mailman 2.1</a>, unless otherwise specified.
+
+<h4>Mailman is a pain in the ass for the end user.</h4>
+
+Jamie must have reviewed a pre-2.0 version, because Mailman releases
+since 2.0 have implemented the "sane" recipe.  Indeed it would be
+insane not to.  I may be mad, but I'm not insane.  In fact, in Mailman
+2.1, there are several ways to get unsubscribed, any one of which will
+work just fine:
+
+<ul>
+    <li>Send a message to <em>list</em>-leave or <em>list</em>-unsubscribe and
+        reply to the confirmation message.  It doesn't matter at all what
+        is in your original message.
+    <li>Mail "unsubscribe" to the <em>list</em>-request address and
+        reply to the confirmation message.
+    <li>Use a mail reader that understands the standard
+        <a href="http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2369.html">RFC 2369</a>
+        List-Unsubscribe header, then just click on that header and
+        reply to the confirmation message.
+    <li>Visit your <em>user's options page</em>, click on the
+        Unsubscribe button and reply to the confirmation message.
+        Note that with Mailman 2.1, mailing lists can be personalized,
+        which means the url to your options page can be included in
+        the footer of every message you get from the list (digests
+        currently excluded).
+</ul>
+
+What could be simpler?
+
+<h4>Mailman's password mechanism provides zero security.</h4>
+
+I disagree with Jamie about the utility of Mailman's passwords because
+in general they do prevent malicious people from changing your
+subscription options out from under you.  But I will also concede that
+he has a point about password management by naive users, so you should
+know that it is trivial to disable monthly password reminders, either
+on a list-wide basis or on a per-user basis.
+
+<p>Monthly password reminders serve additional purposes though: they
+remind you of lists you are on which you may have forgotten about,
+they remind you about how to get unsubscribed from such lists, and
+they offer an opportunity for lists to cull their membership of
+non-functioning addresses.  In Mailman 2.1, the monthly reminders can
+be sent out with <a
+href="http://cr.yp.to/proto/verp.txt">VERP</a>-like envelopes, Mailman
+can unambiguously parse any bounces from dead addresses, and can use
+this information to automatically disable or delete disappeared
+members.
+
+<p>When you subscribe to a mailing list, the password is completely
+optional -- omit it and Mailman generates a random one for you.  You
+generally don't need to know your password except if you want to
+change your delivery options, e.g. to temporarily disable delivery
+while you're on vacation, or to switch to digest delivery, subscribe
+to topics, etc.  For simple membership management (subscribing and
+unsubscribing), you never need to know it.  The user options
+<b>are</b> useful.
+
+<h4>Web-based subscriptions</h4>
+
+If all you care about is web-based subscriptions, then yes it's pretty
+easy to set up a simple CGI to do this.  It's just as easy to do with
+Mailman as any other mailing list software.  Note though, that
+Mailman's web interface is much more sophisticated because you can do
+nearly all the list configuration through the web.  Okay, this is of
+primary benefit for list owners rather than list members, and Jamie's
+rant is focused on the member experience.  Note though, that Mailman's
+subscription page also gives the user the option of selecting a
+default language (for multilingual lists) and their preferred delivery
+mechanism (digests or regular delivery).