Any opinions on Lyris?
Matt Mower
We are looking for an enterprise mailing list system and wondered if
anyone had any opinions on the Lyris product (www.lyris.com). It looks
quite good and we intend to install the evaluation product.
Does anyone have any good/bad opinions to share?
Best regards.
matt.
--
Matt Mower, Intranet Services Team, University of North London
T: +44-(0)171-753-3288 F: +44-(0)171-753-5120 E: m.m...@unl.ac.uk
Tom Lane
> We are looking for an enterprise mailing list system and wondered if
> anyone had any opinions on the Lyris product (www.lyris.com). It looks
> quite good and we intend to install the evaluation product.
> Does anyone have any good/bad opinions to share?
The faq-maintainers mail list was switched over to Lyris
(unannounced) a few weeks ago, and the general opinion of the
victims^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hreaders is that it bites.
Its handling of mail headers is highly nonstandard. In particular,
because it generates a different Message-ID: in the message
delivered to each individual subscriber, Reply-To: headers are
meaningless to anyone except the replyer. Thus threading based on
Reply-To:s fails utterly. But that's not wrong-headed enough: the
current version directly violates the RFCs while engaged in this
silly exercise, because the Message-IDs that it generates end in
@someone.elses.site --- these are not its property, and it risks
breaking *other* software by generating a duplicate ID. (Not to
mention risking getting its mail dumped into /dev/null. Because
of a certain notorious spam engine, many people filter against
messages containing their own email address in the Message-ID.
Guess what Lyris generates.)
Lyris also has no problem with altering the body text of messages.
There was an amusing/depressing thread going on in faq-maintainers
until we figured out that *any string whatever* matching [x*@x*]
(for some fairly large class of characters x) would be replaced by
the recipient's own email address in the copy delivered to each
recipient. Some of the less tuned-in list members were still
piping up and saying "HEY! Why are you folks all discussing *me*?"
as late as last week. IIRC, Lyris also breaks PGP-signed messages
by its gratuitous rewritings.
In general the software appears to have been written by people
having only a passing familiarity with the mail RFCs, and no
familiarity whatever with the customary behavior of mail list servers
and the reasons for same.
In fairness, the principal author appears to be responsive to
these complaints, and maybe some future version will act more like
a mail list server is supposed to act. But right now, I wouldn't
touch it with a ten foot pole. I am not aware of *any* respect
in which I prefer its behavior to other mailservers. Perhaps it
has some advantages from an admin's point of view, but not from
a mail list user's.
regards, tom lane