List Server Roundup: The Key Players
ListManager is aimed at the entire list server market, starting with a free version that supports 50 mailing lists with up to 200 subscribers apiece. The product is then tiered through many pricing levels that range in the cap on subscribers per list and the peak messages per hour performance of the server engine. There's a big jump between the Gold level (which limits lists to 2,000 subscribers each for $1,500) and the Titanium level (which allows 50,000 subscribers per list) for $3000. Both levels support 10,000 messages per hour. Like a movie theater pricing its popcorn, Lyris seems to want to convince an enterprise looking at a medium size product to consider a large.
Whereas ListProc, Majordomo, and Listserv rely on external mail transport agents (e.g., sendmail or qmail for Unix) to handle receipt of e-mail, ListManager includes its own SMTP daemon. While this is simple for machines with no mail transport agents of their own, machines already running SMTP delivery must be tweaked to coexist with ListManager. The easiest tweaks are to configure the default mail transport agent (such as sendmail) to forward list messages onto ListManager's daemon or to move sendmail to a nondefault port and configure ListManager to forward nonlist e-mail over to sendmail.
Lyris is unambiguous in its dislike of spam, and ListManager is deliberately designed to be unhelpful for those wishing to use it to produce and disseminate spam. ListManager uses a "double opt-in" subscription model that requires subscribers to confirm their e-mail addresses before being added to a list. This prevents a spammer from unilaterally adding addresses to a one-way distribution list.
ListManager includes Web-based message delivery accessible by either list subscribers or guests. An add-on product called MultiView supports Usenet-based message delivery, allowing subscribers to read lists using newsreader software.
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FurlFull Web-based administration access is available, and, unlike L-Soft, Lyris encourages users to run the Web tools on a different server. Although all administration functions are available via the Web interface, ListManager also accepts commands and understands the syntax of ListProc, Majordomo, and Listserv. The ListManager installation also includes Apache Web server for machines without a Web server.
While ListManager does not include source code the way ListProc does, it does provide a programmer's API for customized extension of the list server.
Like L-Soft, Lyris offers an outsourcing service so organization may choose ListManager's features without having to install it on their own servers.
Windows Server 2008 R2 provides enhanced management control over resources across the enterprise. Downlaod this PDF to learn more.
