Hi,
We’re currently hosted by EMWD who upgraded the Mailman 2 cPanel/Python and have been unable to resolve the issues we’re experiencing.
We would like to join a Mailman 3 list to see how it all looks and works.
Do you have any recommendation?
Best, Cathryn McGuire
On 6/2/25 10:55, Cathryn McGuire wrote:
Hi,
We’re currently hosted by EMWD who upgraded the Mailman 2 cPanel/Python and have been unable to resolve the issues we’re experiencing.
We would like to join a Mailman 3 list to see how it all looks and works.
Do you have any recommendation?
Welcome to the mailman-users@mailman3.org list. As far as your EMWD migration from cPanel Mailman 2.1 to Mailman 3 is conerned, I think you'll find little if any change as far as email posting to the list and email from the list is concerned, but EMWD has their own proprietary web UI for list management and archiving, so the web UI at EMWD is quite different from that for this list.
I'm not sure if we can help with the issues you're having, but if you tell us what they are, we can try.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Hi Mark et al,
We have been very happy with EMWD as they work tirelessly to mitigate issues since CPanel's server upgrade. Hopefully a couple of remaining things will be resolved shortly. We are aware that Mailman 2's run is pretty much at the end (we are members of the Mailman 2 user's group). We are Administrators of a small neighbourhood group with more than 20 years of archives.
We love the simple functionality of Mailman 2. One post goes to the entire membership by email. Any reply arrives by email; either immediately or as part of the 9:00 am Digest. No websites or browsers or sign-ins. No threads or topics. Simply emails back and forth.
Does Mailman 3 have the ability to function this way?
Might someone invite us to temporarily join their group so we can see how Mailman 3 operates from the point of view of members?
Thanks, Cathy
PS I typed this up earlier but must have lost it. Apologies if it's a repeat.
On 2025-06-02 20:19, Cathryn McGuire wrote:
We are Administrators of a small neighbourhood group with more than 20 years of archives.
You'll have to talk to EMWD to see if your archives will be kept with the migration. They have a completely custom web interface for archival.
I'm going to re-state what Mark said here. To quote Mark Sapiro:
As far as your EMWD migration from cPanel Mailman 2.1 to Mailman 3 is conerned, I think you'll find little if any change as far as email posting to the list and email from the list is concerned, but EMWD has their own proprietary web UI for list management and archiving, so the web UI at EMWD is quite different from that for this list.
THEREFORE...
We love the simple functionality of Mailman 2. One post goes to the entire membership by email. Any reply arrives by email; either immediately or as part of the 9:00 am Digest. That part isn't going to change. No websites or browsers or sign-ins. Well, you manage your list SOMEHOW, probably with EMWD's web panel and UI panel. No threads or topics. There's no "threads" like forums have, but discussions by topic at least in mailman 2 and mailman 3 have still existed and probably still will exist. Simply emails back and forth.
Does Mailman 3 have the ability to function this way? (Read my last statements) Might someone invite us to temporarily join their group so we can see how Mailman 3 operates from the point of view of members?\
EMWD uses their **own custom UI** for management and archiving. This means that we can't give you any real guidance on EMWD and such for how it relates to user management, etc. because the standard Mailman 3 UI (Postorious) for that won't be what you use with EMWD. So we can't really assist you to see how things will be from the view of "members of the list" in that front.
For the vast majority of users and use cases though, if all they care about is the email messages being sent to the list and received from the list, nothing will change for users. It's the *management* components and EMWD's custom UIs you'll have to work with though, not the standard Postorious Mailman3 UI.
At my dayjob, we use mailing lists here on Mailman3, albeit with the standard Postorious UI, but we have a separate management UI that we use for managers to check who is a member, remove members, etc. that uses the Mailman API and not Postorious, but the core management group (myself and IT staff) use Postorious for our management tasks and to see if Mailman is working and such. Additionally, we have 53 lists and well over a thousand members on some of othe lists and it works well. The vast majority of the members only care that the email functionality works, and it does for them. (None of them use digest format mail notifications, but that's because the lists tend to be more 'realtime' for those members.) (And before you ask, those lists are not open)
If you have *more specific* questions beyond "do the same basics of Mailman2 like digests, email handling, etc. still behave more or less the same way" then you should ask those questions *specifically*.
If your specific questions revolve around the management interface, you have to talk to EMWD. Same with message archives.
Thomas
Hi,
Although I'm replying to Thomas, I'm going to address this message to Cathy.
Thomas Ward via Mailman-users writes:
You'll have to talk to EMWD to see if your archives will be kept with the migration. They have a completely custom web interface for archival.
When I talked with Brian several years ago he emphasized that moving to Mailman 3 at EMWD would be seamless. Presumably that would include moving the archives, which is quite straightforward if you're starting from a stock Mailman 2.[1]
EMWD uses their **own custom UI** for management and archiving. This means that we can't give you any real guidance on EMWD and such for how it relates to user management, etc.
This isn't really a problem though. Either way, the new UI will be new to your administrators, and EMWD has historically had an extremely good reputation for working with administrators on such things.[2] But your *subscribers* are *not* using the web interface. Perhaps that will change, but you aren't worried about that, rather that Mailman 3 will enforce use of a web UI. It won't -- if your users don't personalize their profiles in Mailman 2, there's no need for them to start in Mailman 3.
The intermediate case is the moderators, but I bet you are doing little or no moderation, and again, EMWD is probably happy to help their clients with that level of education.
Also, you did mention the archives. If users are using the archives, the UI will change (either EMWD or HyperKitty). I would expect that could be an issue. As far as that going, EMWD probably has client- focused lists that use their web UIs that you could subscribe to, or perhaps are already subscribed to!
I haven't looked at the mockups of Affinity etc that Brian published in years, but at the time they seemed streamlined compared to Postorius and HyperKitty. Between the fact that the "email-only" day-to-day operation you have with Mailman 2 will continue without a hitch with either stock Mailman 3 web UIs or EMWD web UIs, and Brian's pride in his work, I think that you should run, not walk, to EMWD and ask them the same questions.
Of course all of my estimates of what EMWD would or would not be happy to do should be confirmed by asking them!
Moving to a different hosting service or setting up your own server would be another matter, but as long as you're continuing to work with EMWD whom you find trustworthy, the sooner you move the better.
Steve
Footnotes: [1] There were enough differences between the Mailman 2 and 3 web UIs that he wasn't going to force anyone to upgrade. Organizations that depend on using the web UIs for their daily workflow could have their efficiency degraded while people learned the new system. This is especially true for the new EMWD web UIs for configuration and archives. But he was confident that the transition would not cause long interruptions in service or changes in the way you send, receive, and work with mail.
[2] Working with even dozens of users is another matter, and I can imagine that EMWD would draw the line there.
-- GNU Mailman consultant (installation, migration, customization) Sirius Open Source https://www.siriusopensource.com/ Software systems consulting in Europe, North America, and Japan
On 6/2/25 17:19, Cathryn McGuire wrote:
Might someone invite us to temporarily join their group so we can see how Mailman 3 operates from the point of view of members?
You are a member of this list, mailman-users@mailman3.org. It is a standard, mailman3 list albeit it runs on the latest, pre-release software.
You have now posted twice to this list and I think this is the third reply to your posts. What is it you are looking for with "someone invite us to temporarily join their group" beyond what you have as a member of this list?
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
Mark Sapiro wrote:
I'm not sure if we can help with the issues you're having, but if you tell us what they are, we can try.
Upon rereading your initial post, I now think I understand that the issues you are having are with the current cPanel fork of Mailman 2.1 called Mailman 2.2 and running under Python 3. I know there are multiple issues with this, some of which have been addressed by cPanel, but porting a program like Mailman 2.1 to Python 3 is going to be full of issues mostly due to character encoding because Python 3 strings are different from Python 2 strings. There will be encoding and decoding errors all over the place. I think cPanel is working on these but the fixes aren't necessarily simple.
-- Mark Sapiro <mark@msapiro.net> The highway is for gamblers, San Francisco Bay Area, California better use your sense - B. Dylan
I think this is the thread where they're posting updates on the remaining issues:
https://support.cpanel.net/hc/en-us/community/posts/31032467176087-Mailman-2...
And the changelog is here:
https://docs.cpanel.net/changelogs/126-change-log/
Personally, I'm staying on v124 for now, but if your preferences are set for automatic cPanel updates, it may be too late. Unfortunately it can't be rolled back.
participants (4)
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Cathryn McGuire -
Mark Sapiro -
Russell Clemings -
Stephen J. Turnbull -
Thomas Ward