Lists.berkeley.edu: Mailman versus Sympa

Updated September 14, 2004

Lists.berkeley.edu: GNU Mailman versus Sympa

A comparison of selected attributes of GNU Mailman and Sympa, mailing list management packages being investigated at the University of California, Berkeley.

This comparison summarizes selected characteristics and attributes of these packages, and is not intended to be a comprehensive comparative evaluation. For a detailed listing of how each package's features compare with campus needs, based on a March 2004 survey, please see Mailing List Management Packages: Feature Matrix (Updated April 14, 2004).

Attributes in common

Both GNU Mailman and Sympa:

Have a feature set which is likely to satisfy most or all campus needs for mailing list management.
Have been under continual development for at least six years, and continue to be actively developed by communities consisting of multiple developers.
Are written in widely used and highly portable development languages: Python and Perl, respectively, for GNU Mailman and Sympa. (Sympa also includes a component written in ANSI C for speed.)

Some key attributes contrasted

	GNU Mailman	Sympa
Development community	GNU Mailman is being developed as a public open source project, with a repository at SourceForge.net.	Sympa was developed by the Comité Réseau des Universités (CRU), a consortium of French universities, for their common use. A public source code respository is available on the Sympa website, and contributions from outside developers are occasionally incorporated into the project.
User community	GNU Mailman is among the most widely used open source mailing list management packages. It is used by some high profile ISPs, corporations, and organizations to provide public mailing list services, including the UNIversity Security Operations Group (Unisog) and Apple Computer, Inc.	Perhaps largely due to its origins, Sympa still appears to be primarily used in France and elsewhere in Europe, along with some scattered installations in places such as Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Some smaller ISPs and non-profit organizations are among its non-academic users.
Users in higher education	GNU Mailman is in use at a number of prominent US higher education institutions, including Duke University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Rice University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington, as well as one of UC Berkeley's sister campuses, the University of California, Irvine.	In a May 2004 paper, Sympa's authors claim "4,000 known sites" are using the package, "primarily ... academic institutions." However, it is just starting to make its way into the US higher education community. In late 2003, Brandeis University implemented Sympa for campus-wide use, followed in Spring 2004 by Tufts University. In addition, in 2004, Texas A&M began using Sympa for dynamic (database-driven) mailing lists for campus announcements and course lists, alongside an existing installation of Listserv for other campus maillists.
End user documentation	Because of Mailman's widespread inroads in higher education, several universities have prepared detailed end-user documentation for their mailing list managers and subscribers. Examples of end-user documentation from MIT, the University of Virginia, and the University of Washington can be viewed via the Mailman Notes page. This documentation may potentially be available to UC Berkeley for adaptation for campus use.	There is relatively little end-user documentation available for mailing list administrators and subscribers using Sympa. Tufts University has prepared documentation for the users of their Sympa-based EList service, which may potentially be available to UC Berkeley for adaptation for campus use. This documentation - which is available in PDF format, and would thus require conversion for use on the Web or in other applications, can be viewed via the Sympa Notes page.
Ease of installation	GNU Mailman is widely regarded as relatively quick and easy to get up and running, with few installation prerequisites. GNU Mailman is also bundled with several Unix/Linux-based operating systems, where it is either pre-installed or included on installation CDs. These operating systems include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the operating system supported by IST-CCS on many of the hosts in the CalMail cluster (view the list of bundled software under "Server Packages Included") and Apple's Mac OS X Server (view the list of bundled software under "Mail Services").	Sympa appears to be regarded as moderately straightforward to get up and running, but not as easy as GNU Mailman. The pre-requisites include some readily obtained Perl libraries and a SQL-accessible relational database. Brandeis and Tufts are both using Sympa with MySQL, an open source RDBMS which is easy to set up and administer.
Support	There is a large and active mailing list through which sites running GNU Mailman can request and provide peer help. In May 2004, for instance, 654 messages were posted to that list.	The Sympa mailing list sees relatively little traffic. In May 2004, for instance, 23 messages were posted to that list. CRU staff have generally provided excellent support - detailed and accurate responses - to questions and problem reports posted to that list. However, on occasion there have been delays of at least several days - and in a few cases, of longer duration - until responses have been provided, and some questions have not been answered, at least on the list. UC Berkeley might need to develop relationships with the limited number of other US and Canadian universities using Sympa as an additional source of peer help.
Pace of development	Recent changes to Mailman have been relatively minor. The current major release, 2.1, is mature but static. Some possible changes that might be incorporated into a 3.0 release are summarized on the Mailman Developers page, and are being discussed via the mailman3-dev list. As of September 2004, these discussions appear to be very preliminary, however.	Sympa has recently been, and appears to still currently be, under very active development, which of course can be both a blessing and a curse. As just one example of changes in store, a future release of Sympa expected later in 2004 may offer the option of using the Template Toolkit (TT2), a spec for the Perl-based templates for creating many of Sympa's web pages. From postings to the Sympa mailing list, it appears this package appears to be fairly well designed to facilitate migrations to new releases.
Handling of large lists	GNU Mailman has occasionally been reported to have performance issues mailing to very large lists. However, there have been some reports that the SMTP server, rather than the mailing list management package, may be more likely to be the bottleneck when sending mail to such lists. In addition, few campus lists, if any, would be likely to exceed tens of thousands of users.	Perhaps in part because it is based on an RDBMS rather than flat files, Sympa can apparently handle very large lists, with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Dynamic lists	As one contributor to a Mailman developers list wrote in October 2003: `[In response to:] Mailman v2.1 has a plugin layer for the membership roster. Its not a fully mature interface, but there are LDAP and SQL adaptors in the wild. This interface was largely bolted on, so it's clumsy. Mailman 3 [a planned future release] will be defined by interfaces from the start.` Examples of current "in the wild" adaptors, which are described by their authors as somewhat rough or in early stages of development, include: SQL member adaptor (Joshua Ginsberg) LDAP member adaptor (Martin Whinnery)	Sympa lists can be based, in part or in whole, on dynamic lists of email addresses returned by queries to SQL-accessible databases and LDAP directories, potentially including the CalNet Directory Service. While this feature is quite powerful and flexible, it does have some quirks, such as those discussed in an FAQ entry regarding limitations and complications in Sympa's SQL list inclusion features.

Head to head comparisons

We are currently aware of only a few head-to-head comparisons between these two packages.

During May 2003 through April 2004, Tufts University selected Sympa over GNU Mailman, Listserv, Listproc, Smartlist, Majordomo, Postie, and two other packages, and implemented Sympa for campus maillists. Sympa and GNU Mailman were the two finalists, and "IT and mass-mailing community members" were invited to try out both of these packages, running on test servers. According to Tuft's Mass Mailing List Replacement Project site:
Reasons for selecting Sympa include: * The majority of the users surveyed preferred Sympa. * Sympa is easy to maintain and customize. * Tufts' affiliates with trumpeter (e-mail) accounts can use that username and password, so they will not need to memorize another one or have their password e-mailed in the clear to them. * Non-Tufts subscribers can generate a Sympa specific username and password. * Sympa can expand to accommodate "announcement only" mailing lists, this will permit users to use a single software product for both purposes. * Sympa accommodates s/mime, a future technology that Tufts and the Internet2 community hope to use.
This project site also offers a comparison matrix of campus requirements and mailing list management package features.
In 2003, Brandeis University selected Sympa over GNU Mailman, LISTSERV, Listar, and Lyris' ListManagerSQL, to replace an installation of an earlier version of Lyris. When we asked Brandeis' Rich Graves to identify the the criteria that led Brandeis to choose Sympa, he responded:
Very active support and stable funding from the university and open-source communities (albeit mostly non-US, hence the rather odd wording of some help text...). Ease of implementing two-phase passwords -- brandeis.edu email addresses are authenticated against a central LDAP database, others are authenticated against passwords stored in the database. I've seen similar effects achieved with GNU Mailman at UW, for example, but not out of the box. Use of stable technologies that we already use and understand -- sendmail, apache, mysql, ldap, perl. The single-signon and database-driven features allowed very easy integration with academic systems. It turned out to be pretty easy to add a few auxiliary tables and build a basic courses portal around Sympa.
Multimedia communications firm FTPress compared earlier versions of Sympa and Mailman head-to-head in MAILMAN VS SYMPA. From the versions compared, this comparision was likely prepared in Spring 2002. Their conclusion:
Mailman, being a GNU project, is very well-known ; it is even included in Linux Red Hat. It has been chosen by many sites where getting a standard mailing-list manager running quickly was a priority. However it appears to be less suitable when dealing with a larger site (more lists, large number of owners/moderators, exploitation of SQL/LDAP type sources of data, lists numbering more than 10 000 members, list portal.) Conversely, Sympa's functional versatility makes it more difficult to install and set-up. However, given its architecture allowing maximal delegation, the possibilities it offers for customisation and growth, it presently remains the best solution to build a list server for professional delivery such as FTPress's.
Dgroups, a "starting point for fostering groups and communities in international development," appears to have considered Sympa before choosing GNU Mailman as the mailing list management package for its electronic communities. An April 2004 executive summary identifying GNU Mailman as the selected package is available as An Enhanced Dgroups Service: Executive Summary.

One of the inputs to this decision may have been be a paper linked from the Dgroups site, prepared two years earlier, in April 2002, A Comparison of Three Mailing List Managers: Lyris vs. Sympa vs. Mailman. However, that paper evaluated Sympa more favorably than Mailman, drawing the following conclusions:
Lyris is a better mailing list manager at this time than both Mailman and Sympa. Mailman is a fairly old project, and thus it is missing key features that Lyris has. Mailman needs much work for it to be considered a viable alternative to Lyris. Sympa is a newer development and as such it is superior to Mailman in many ways. Its user interface is good and so is its administrative interface. It also has many of the features that Lyris has. However, it is missing two key features in good auditing tools and full database integration. Until these features are added to the Sympa, it cannot replace Lyris as the MLM of choice for Bellanet. The fact that Sympa is open source should not be considered a disadvantage since there are many excellent products that are open source and there is a good possibility that Sympa would not lose its development community. It would be especially fitting for Bellanet to use the open source product since Bellanet is actively promoting the open source ideas. Unfortunately, it just isn't possible at this time. 4.0 RECOMMENDATIONS It is recommended that Bellanet continue to use Lyris as its mailing list manager. However, it should keep an eye on Sympa. Should the archiving system in Sympa be moved from MhOnArc to a relational database, a switch to Sympa from Lyris should be considered.
This paper also includes a matrix comparing selected features of each of these three mailing list management packages.