I'm looking for a dead simple mailing list (unix friendly). Robustness, fine-grained configurability, "enterprise-readiness" (whatever that means) are not requirements. I just need to set up a tiny mailing list for a few friends. Rather than hack something up myself, I was wondering if anybody knows of anything already out there with a similar goal?
I should note right now that I don't want an externally hosted mailing list -- it needs to be software I can install and run on my server. I know of many places I can host a mailing list at (Google/Yahoo groups), but it would be nice to keep the data local.
Mailman is one of the simplest mailing list packages I've come across, so if Mailman is more than you want to deal with I'd suggest just adding an entry into /etc/aliases
for your mailing list.
Of course you have to manage it by hand, but you said it's only for a few friends so that may not be a problem. Just create an entry in /etc/aliases
such as:
mylist: me@somedomain.com, myfriend@somedomain.com, \
myotherfriend@differentdomain.com
and then run newaliases
. It doesn't get much simpler than that. If you want an archive you can create a dummy account on your mail server and add them to the list.
It's not as user friendly as Mailman but it's simple and you can be up and running in 5 minutes.
If you're not afraid of perl, give Minimalist a try.
If you want something easy to setup, with a user interface on top then I would recommend to check out WP Mailster (WordPress plugin) or Mailster (Joomla plugin).
No matter which of the two CMS you prefer, you will only need 5 minutes to have a "naked" WordPress or Joomla and the plugin installed.
It really works well and is easy to use. I have used Mailster for years and recently, with my site's move to WordPress have switched wo WP Mailster.