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List to starboard

Posted on 22 Sep 2005 at 12:28

Mark Newton blows the dust off his list server and gets into a GoogleFight

Regular readers may recall that Mark's company has recently been moving its outward-facing servers out of his offices and into a new location in Canary Wharf. The reason for doing this was to get more bandwidth at a lower cost, and also to locate the servers in a climate-controlled environment with backup electrical supplies. First the web servers, then the Exchange server were moved, and now finally the list server needed dealing with - this old server was an NT 4 box with a 2GB hard disk, and to say it was struggling is a bit of an understatement.

Then came a call from a client who was using a list server that we'd set up at Merula (www.merula.net), and this client wanted to set up some more lists for a different branch of its company. We approached our ISP, www.blackbird.co.uk (which also owns Merula as it happens), to set up such a service, as it had previously set up a list server for one of its own clients using Xtreeme MailXpert (www.xtreeme.com), an easy-to-setup list-server program that has a simple but versatile user interface. It's also good value at $59 for the standard edition. After the usual battle to get it configured the way the client wanted it to be, all was working fine, but then the client, in the way clients do, decided it needed functions this product doesn't support.

The two main missing features for this client were a web interface to manage the list and the ability to handle super lists - lists that combine multiple lists so that one email sent to the super list will go to all members of all the lists, but no member will receive more than one copy, even if they're members of several of those lists. This saves annoying those users who would otherwise receive multiple copies of the same message - a great way to lose subscribers.

We had to come up with another solution, and brushing the dust off our old list server we decided that there was a business to be had running a list server for clients as well as for our own use. (In the past, we hadn't wanted to get into this because of bandwidth restrictions.) After looking at several list-server solutions, we settled on our old favourite from Gordano (www.gordano.com). This product has acquired a reputation for speed by using clever routing algorithms that avoid making multiple connections to any particular mail server. But this wasn't the only reason for our choice: Gordano's list of functionality is equally impressive and it's infinitely customisable via its own scripting language, which meant we could probably adapt it to any new client's needs.

Gordano has a series of products that go under the overall heading of Gordano Messaging Suite (GMS), a name that suggests this software does more than just handle email lists. The core of the suite is a mail server that runs on Windows, Solaris, Linux and AIX platforms, which, as well as offering POP, SMTP and IMAP services, has a web front-end for users to get their email and full collaboration with calendaring. The mail server also has anti-spam and anti-virus filters, both of which are necessary additions for any modern email server. Instant messaging is built in for users who want this sort of communication channel, and SMS messaging and pagers are supported too, so you can see it's a truly extensive and capable suite of programs - and in our experience, the support is quite superb.