can anybody suggest a good MAILING LIST script?

marcnyc

Hello I need to install a mailing list script on my server (where I have SMF among other things) to manage my userbase and send out periodic newsletters. The features I am looking for are:
1. free
2. bounce handler
3. WYSIWYG editor
I need to be able to create html emails and have them sent out as html and as plain text and I need to have a bounce handler (possibly without cron jobs) to deal with bounced emails.
I don't have a budget for this project (non-profit) so it'd be great if you could suggest a free script (possibly PHP/MySQL, but I'll look into CGI/Perl) that maybe is open source and has a big community using it and developing it further.
Thanks for all your suggestions.
Marc

piersk

Well, the list software with the biggest community behind it would have to be MailMan. The only downside (as far as I am aware) is that it uses Python as a programming language.

However, there is always PHPList. For a list of features, see here.

marcnyc

I don't know what Python is but I suppose if it's a programming language like PHP then I'd have to have it installed on my server to use it, and I doubt I do, plus MailMan seems not to be web-based, hence no editor etc, right?
I've checked out PHPList and that's what I need except it has no editor...

AstroTeg

Use use mailman to manage several lists. Its got a good amount of power to it.

As for a WYSIWYG editor, no, it doesn't have one. Why? Its an email MAILING LIST MANAGER. That means you can use ANY WYSIWYG editor you choose. You just craft up your newsletter and send it to your list. Everyone on your list will then receive it.

Mailman has the ability to archive messages to an html page. This requires cron to be run (I believe) but probably has a way to make it run manually.

As for bounce handling, Mailman is pretty good with this too. Although you'll want to fiddle with the settings since by default its configured to run as a mailing list manager versus a newsletter manager and may not be as strict as you like. There's a way to export the list of email addresses, but I'm not sure if that includes those that have bounced or if you can just get a list of bounced addresses. You may have to fiddle with it...