All --
I know that Mailman is intended to be more or
less sender agnostic, however, I would like your
recommendations for email client software that
will suit my specific needs and still play well
with Mailman (announce-only lists).
(preferably version 2.1.9, or whatever the folks
over at Red Hat linux are approving these
days...that's another story. I have a
development server that is currently on the
standard distribution of 2.1.12, and am happy to
move up at any time, but the collaborators are
sticking to Red Hat's release.)
Here are my specific client software needs:
1) a cross-platform client (Mac & Windows; Mac
10.5 & up, Windows XP & Windows 7)
2) capable of sending "plain-text" messages (see below)
3) capable of sending to mailman in many
languages (e.g. English, French, Spanish,
Portuguese, Russian, Thai, Khmer, Lao, Chineese),
without munging the characters such that they
come out incorrectly in the list messages
4) reasonably simple to configure and maintain
for a user base of 10-40 users located all over
the world
5) capable of off-line message creation (so not
solely web-mail based solutions)
Any suggestions from folks experienced with a
specific email client and Mailman are greatly
appreciated.
Sincerely,
Drew Tenenholz
Read on if you like too much detail.....
I work part-time for a non-profit which has a
subscriber base of about 50,000-60,000 across a
number of lists. Some lists are still being
faithfully served by majordomo, but growth is
forcing us to move on to a list-serve that can
handle the languages mentioned above (and with
more growth more languages are likely). Russian
(Cyrillic) was the first real hurdle, and since
I've gotten that to work (Mailman 2.1.12), we've
started playing around with French (Mailman
2.1.9), which one would think is simpler...but is
not turning out to be so.
One thing I'm seeing is that French accents sent
from MS-Entourage (Mac version of Outlook) end up
with surrounding spaces in the SUBJECT LINE ONLY
( e.g. pand é mique instead of pandémique) while
my very old & trusty Eudora 6.2.4 has absolutely
no problems with the same text; go figure!
The business rules for the organization state that mailing list mail MUST:
1) Be in 'plain'-text, not rich text, HTML, etc.
(But obviously, needing non-ASCII characters
means some updated character allowances are
required.)
2) NEVER contain attachments of any sort
3) NOT contain personal signatures or signatures
added by corporate/governmental/education server
like "This communication was sent to m...@me.com
and is intended only for that recipient, if you
are them, don't read this message...."
The goal is to send to people all over the world
(we're sending to 196 countries right now) in a
way that readers in New York and the African bush
can all read that same message and not need a
very fancy computer setup or lots of bandwidth to
receive.
They've been 'standardized' on Eudora for a lot
of years, but the Russians don't use it, and
anyway it can't be installed on Windows 7. So,
it is time to change, and I'm hoping to find
something that I can help all of my list posters.
It would be helpful if this email client had a
setting to NOT line-wrap messages, there is this
whole long editing and proofing process before
sending out the announcement (all managed by a
closed [soon to be Mailman] list), and
line-wrapping becomes a real PITA.
Our allowed posters are happy to use what I tell
them to (more or less), and they don't need a
single email client for all of their email
accounts; in fact sometimes it is better if they
use one client for messages related to this
organization and a different client for any other
accounts.
The off-line message creation is necessary
because frankly we have people who a are off the
grid a lot (either travelling or in places
without any meaningful internet access). Also,
the posts require a good deal of thought,
formatting, and correction. Having a tiny little
composition window is just not going to cut it.
What some people do now is literally that: 'cut'
from the email application, 'paste' into MS-Word
for corrections, then cut/paste back into email &
send. (Talk about your encoding glitches....)
Any suggestions from folks experienced with a
specific email client and Mailman are greatly
appreciated.
Sincerely,
Drew Tenenholz
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