[FOSDEM] Meetup for mail server admins on Saturday @ 15:30

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton]

On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 10:38 AM Sam Tuke <mail at samtuke.com> wrote:

> Hi Luke, I'm not sure we've met, thanks for joining the discussion :)

:)

> Happy to hear that these stalwart tools have been serving you well.

i took a path of least resistance (debian, plus incremental
improvements), yet still it is tough as hell.  scrambling to get
hackers off my server during that exim4 exploit for example: luckily i
have offsite rsync'd backups and was able to do a file-diff/cmp, and
it was a VM anyway.

> > if i may be... ah... how can i put this... email sysadmins "giving
> > up" on setting up a mailing list and setting up a *forum* instead,
> > has me concerned.
>
> The challenge described was solely with Mailman 3, otherwise known as the
> combination of: Mailman Core, Postorius, MailmanClient, HyperKitty, and
> HyperKitty Mailman plugin.

oo that's quite a list.

> Specifically: Docker images with hard-coded IP
> addresses, Podman storage layer incompatibilities, and a ruby script that died
> leaving few clues as to its murderer.

*pained*.  not at the mess, but at the use of docker images.

a quick search "apt-cache search postorius" shows:
mailman3-web - Django project integrating Mailman3 Postorius and HyperKitty
mailman3-full - Full Mailman3 mailing list management suite (metapackage)
python3-django-postorius - Web user interface to access GNU Mailman3

a search for hyperkitty:
python3-django-hyperkitty - Web user interface to access GNU Mailman3 archives
python3-mailman-hyperkitty - Mailman3 plugin to archive emails with HyperKitty
mailman3-web - Django project integrating Mailman3 Postorius and HyperKitty
mailman3-full - Full Mailman3 mailing list management suite (metapackage)

and that tells me that it really, *really* should be a drop-dead
simple process... *if* you're using debian... because someone has
already done all the hard work and made sure those all work and work
well, out-of-the-box.

there's a really good reason why i use debian, even though they
screwed users over by forcing systemd onto people.

> No doubt with more time I would have resolved
> these, but those of us who met have been waiting long enough to continue those
> discussions.
>
> In any case Discourse was a better option from the start in my view, for the
> features which were mentioned - it has many tools for fostering and managing
> communities which other systems lack, and has extensive support for
> mailing-list-like interaction (submit topics by email, reply by email, forward
> all topics by email).
>
> I've also run mailman 2 for over a decade, and it's a reliable ally that's easy
> to configure. However that's not the best tool for this job. We are fortunate to
> have a variety of Open Source options in this space, and can each choose the
> tool which suits us best.

yehyeh, absolutely.

l.