Tom Browder writes:
I have no real thoughts about it. I have been talking up my pending mm3 server to my friends who are familiar with using some the paid mail services that provide various usage stats I assume are like resposnes to marketing mails and such.
If you really mean "marketing", you might want to dial that back. There is excellent CRM software out there (some of the good stuff is even open source, I've heard, I have no use for it so don't know what it is :-), but Mailman is not designed for that purpose. I hate to say it, but the only "marketing" Mailman is really adapted to is "push direct marketing", aka "spam", via the standard "announce list" configuration. Of course, announce lists are really intended as a low-traffic complement to higher-traffic discussion lists, but like anything they can be abused.
The problem is that Mailman has no provision for maintaining per-user records of replies or posts, so the easy configuration is to set the announcements' Reply-To to a *non-Mailman* mailbox, which is watched either by a human or a program. But that means that Mailman does not know about the replies at all.
It would not be terribly difficult to write a Handler (plug-in) so that replies to list would be redirected from the list to such a service. However, Mailman has zero facilities for implementing the CRM aspects, and the ability to provide statistics would be crude.
Our local community and tech groups are always interested in surveys that may be sent by e-mail.
It's certainly a reasonable approach to implement that with an announce list. But again, the statistics on the returns would be most easily implemented in a separate application which could be more easily extended with additional features.
Steve