This section provides an overview of the basic top-level questions about what MailMan is and what it does.

What is MailMan?

MailMan is a system that provides any user with an interface to his or her own email account from any web browser anywhere in the world. MailMan is a piece of software that runs on a web server as a part of an existing web site that interacts with a mail server and displays the results through the web server. The output that MailMan produces is pure HTML, and can be understood by any web browser, including very 'thin' browsers such as text-based browsers or kiosks.

Why is MailMan better than the competition?

MailMan is amazingly simple to install, it was specifically built from the ground-up to make installation very easy. Once it's installed, it's one of those things that you can pretty much forget about, we have MailMan installations in the wild that people have apparently completely forgotten about for years that still work fine. Your time is valuable, isn't it? If you spend 15 minutes installing MailMan where it would have taken you a day to install a competing product, then MailMan just easily paid for itself.

Why else is MailMan better than the competition?

MailMan's interface is slick, polished, and professional, and simple enough for even the slowest of end-users to understand without any help. We sell a time-tested commercial product that has been on the market for years, and we have learned a lot about what people want in the process. By using MailMan, you are getting the benefit of all of our experience. Our goal is to minimize our technical support queue by solving problems before your customers even spot them, and we do a pretty good job of that.

Why else is MailMan better than the competition?

MailMan is backed by friendly and professional commercial support. We very actively monitor our technical support queue for new activity all day long, and in the unlikely event that you have any problems with your installation you can ask for help. We use a very sophisticated mail management system that ensures that no support inquiry will ever go unanswered. We are extremely happy to help you with your installation, and if you want then we will even do it for you. For a small fee, of course. We have been in business since 1996 and we have been in the business of supporting MailMan and other products since 1997, so you can be assured that we will still be available to help you if you run into a problem a year from now, two years from now, five years from now, or a decade from now.

What could I use MailMan for?

A MailMan installation could support a free email advertisement site. A different installation of MailMan could provide essential email access for the students at a small community college or the students at a large university. A different installation of MailMan could allow the users of a neighborhood ISP to access their local email accounts through the web without configuring a mail reader. A different installation of MailMan could provide access to any email address anywhere in the world for the patrons of a cyber cafe. Another installation might allow business workers to stay in touch while away from their desks, even while at a pay kiosk in an airport or at a borrowed workstation at another corporation. Another installation might allow a family to keep in touch with friends through Grandma's WebTV box while visiting for Christmas. MailMan is a very general-purpose application that simply provides access to existing email systems. The possibilities are virtually endless.

How is MailMan different from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, Excite Mail, etc?

Free Internet mail services such as the ones mentioned above provide the same basic services that MailMan does, but they provide them through a proprietary web site, generally with the purpose of selling advertisements to a guaranteed repeat audience. Free email sites provide the user with a mailbox and the server to access the mailbox. MailMan is different because it is simply a piece of software, a technology to be applied in any number of ways. MailMan works in conjunction with other mail servers in order to process incoming and outgoing mail, communicating with those servers though well-accepted Internet standards such as the POP3 and STMP protocols. The primary advantage of MailMan is that administrators can control their own MailMan installations. They have the power to specify what mail servers MailMan connects to, what MailMan looks like when it runs, who has access to MailMan, etc. When you use MailMan, you are accessing the same email account that you normally access, not a new account that was created just for you to access through a free email service. Some free email services allow you to access your own email address through the service, but you are still forced into using someone else's web server and you are forced into watching someone else's advertisements. With MailMan you have much more control.

Where would I find current information on MailMan?

The "official" MailMan information site is at the Endymion Corporation web site, at http://www.endymion.com/products/mailman.

What's the short version of how MailMan works from a technical standpoint?

The heart of MailMan is a CGI application written in Perl, version 5. The mail application generates MailMan's user interface dynamically by reading template files filled with HTML code, processing them, and producing output for the user through a web server. To obtain useful email information, MailMan obtains a user's email account authentication information directly from the user (a username, password and server name) and communicates with the user's POP3 email server the way that any client-side mail software ordinarily would. The user sees a list of messages and can select messages for viewing, deletion, and other normal mail tasks. If a user wishes to reply to a message, forward a message, or create a new message, MailMan communicates with an SMTP mail server to send the outgoing message the way that any ordinary client-side software would.

What are some of MailMan's more notable features?

The current version of MailMan supports a frames-based interface that provides the user with a message list in a top frame and individual messages in the bottom frame. This feature makes browsing your mail through a web interface very simple and stress-free and eliminates some of the lag issues that are normally associated with web-based email. No other web-based email system that we know of supports this type of sophisticated interface. MailMan can receive message attachments through any web browser. Message attachments can be MIME encoded using either Base64 or Quoted-Printable encoding, or they can be simple Uuencoded binaries. If you are using a browser that supports file uploading (Netscape 2.0 and above and Microsoft's Internet Explorer 4.0 and above, as of this writing) then you can also send message attachments.

Can I customize the interface of MailMan?

Yes. One of the primary benefits of MailMan is that the entire interface that is presented to the user is the result of a collection of template files that contain ordinary HTML. These templates can be modified in any way as long as they still contain certain vital keywords that allow MailMan to insert valuable information. These keywords are of the form "MailMan(SOMETHING)", and are responsible for showing MailMan's template processor where to insert information on-the-fly. Leave those keywords and snippets in place and you can modify the surrounding HTML as much as you like. We place no restrictions on how you modify the templates, you are not obligated to preserve our logos or links back to our site. (Note that this is not true for the complimentary licenses that we grant for educational and non-profit institutions, which we do require to retain a link to us.) We are thrilled peachy when custom installations preserve credit and provide links back to Endymion Corporation, of course but we don't feel right requiring you to display our logo or links to us if you are a paid licensee.

Also, note that the copyright notices on the templates refer to the content of the templates themselves, not to the MailMan application itself. MailMan's copyright notices are contained within the script and no external notices are necessary. If you modify the templates at all, it's kind of silly to leave our copyright notices on your own custom web designs. We're not complaining, we just wanted to clear that up, since a lot of kind people have inquired about what restrictions we place on modifications to the templates. The answer is: none unless you are using a complimentary license.

What is the difference between the Standard and the Professional editions of MailMan?

The primary difference between the Standard Edition and the Professional Edition is a simple operational rule: the Standard Edition is not allowed to store anything on the HTTP server that it runs on. This precludes the Standard Edition from offering some of the features that you might expect to see in a mail client, such as folders, address books, user signatures and other persistent settings. The purpose of this rule is that the Standard Edition requires virtually no maintenance once it is properly configured. You won't ever have to worry about user quotas, disk allocation, monitoring your user message stores for integrity, backups, or any other administration issues. The Standard Edition is perfect for web sites that are hosted at Internet presence providers that provide limited disk space, or for applications where administration either isn't an option or isn't desired. The Standard Edition can be thought of more as a 'viewer' for a POP3 server than a complete mailer. The only messages that you see are the messages that are actually on the POP3 server at that time.

The Professional Edition, on the other hand, stores user messages on the server side after they have been fetched from the POP3 server, allowing you to organize them into folders like you might in Eudora or whatever mail program you ordinarily use. The Professional Edition also stores user settings on the server side, allowing users to configure options such as a default SMTP server or a signature message to append to outgoing messages.

The Standard Edition is a version that we intend for use by users as a secondary mail system that will compliment an existing client-side mail package, the Professional Edition is intended for use by novice users as a primary mailer. Experienced users will probably not be happy with any version of MailMan as a primary mailer, just like they would not use HotMail or ExciteMail for a primary mailer.

For very large or very serious web mail installations, please consider Saké Mail as an alternative to MailMan.

What is the difference between MailMan and Saké Mail?

Saké Mail is conceptually equivalent to MailMan, but with one critical difference: Saké Mail is not a CGI script. Saké Mail is an application that runs as a plug-in for your web server using the Java Servlet API. Saké Mail produces pure, simple HTML just like MailMan, it sends no Java applets or JavaScript of any kind to your users, so that any web browser can use it, including text-based browsers. Since Saké Mail is a persistent plug-in for your server, it does not need to be loaded and interpreted by your web server each time a user presses a button or clicks on a message. This means that it is immediately available to handle responses at all times, which lowers the time that users wait for a response. It also means that the memory and CPU resources needed for each user on your server are much lower, so you can scale your installation to much larger numbers of users with Sake Mail than you ever could with MailMan or any CGI application. Persistence also allows Saké Mail to cache its interface template files in memory, which eliminates disk accesses during request handling. This lowers your server's memory consumption, increases drive throughput for legitimate operations, and lowers your server's CPU load. Sake Mail has several different modes of operation, one mimics the behavior of the Standard Edition of MailMan (with the addition of a message draft saving feature), one mimics the behavior of the Professional Edition, and it also fully supports IMAP. For serious installations, we strongly recommend using an IMAP server and Saké Mail over any edition of MailMan. For extremely large installations, Saké Mail provides the ability to link your mail installation to a database back-end, rather than storing messages as flat text files. Saké Mail also provides more sophisticated MIME decoding and message attachment handling capabilities than MailMan.

The primary disadvantage of Saké Mail is its complexity. Since MailMan is a simple CGI script, it is relatively easy to install on virtually any web site. Even web sites that are hosted by a hosting provider can generally support MailMan. Sake Mail, on the other hand, must be installed with a web server that supports the Java Servlet API version 2.1 or higher. If you administer your own server then you probably won't have a problem configuring a servlet container such as Jakarta Tomcat to provide a servlet hosting environment, but if your site is hosted at an ISP or an IPP, then you could have a more difficult time installing Saké Mail.

If you simply want to easily add web mail support to an existing POP3 server, then MailMan may be more appropriate. For serious installations that will support thousands of users, Saké Mail is probably more appropriate. More information on Saké Mail is available at http://www.endymion.com/products/sake/mail/.

What's new in version 3.2?

The primary change in version 3.2 is the inclusion of the new blue-and-ripply theme templates instead of the original black/white/teal gear theme. This is part of an overall effort to unify our marketing materials and products to a common image. The 3.2 version also uses a new distribution system that does away with the older, more confusing file names on the scripts and distribution files, and includes this straightforward HTML documentation instead of the HTML and text file FAQ documentation that we used to use, which was generated from XML and XSL files.

What is new in version 3?

Version 3 has been out for quite a while now, but we still get people trickling in from all over the planet that have been using version 2 for years. If you are a user of version 2 of MailMan, you will notice several improvements in version 3. Among them, A new Kiosk Mode, which opens a new window when a user logs in and closes it when they log out. This prevents future users on public terminals from being able to use a combination of 'back' and 'reload' to intrude into a previous user's mail session, because the window containing the mail session (and the user's history, which is the real culprit) is removed when the user logs out. Note that being able to back into a previous user's mail session has nothing to do with cached output, it is possible because web browsers generally store the information needed to re-post forms in their history logs.

Version 3 includes an option to write attachments to a temporary directory on the HTTP server and redirect the user's browser to that temporary file when a user downloads a file. This eliminates usability problems associated with MailMan's normal attachment serving procedure. Normally attachments are generated and served on-the-fly. MailMan includes the proper HTTP headers in this case for a web browser to infer the attachment's file name and store it appropriately, but most web browsers don't handle this information properly. By storing the file and redirecting the user to it, this problem is eliminated because the attachment is served by the web server itself from the file system.

Also, outgoing banners. You can configure version 3 to append 'Get your ISP service for $19.95/mo at Whatever ISP, Inc' to each outgoing message if you like, or you can configure it to append nothing at all.

These new additions are entirely the result of user feedback. We are eager to improve MailMan, and the above improvements address some of the most common concerns of our users over the last couple of years. Please keep those suggestions coming in.

What translations of MailMan are available?

During the initial development of MailMan, we played a pretty passive role in the translation of MailMan templates to other languages. The design of the templates for the Standard Edition have stabilized quite nicely though, and we have become very interested in obtaining translated templates so that we can make them available to other users. Most of the requests for foreign (to us) language versions of MailMan have been coming from Universities. We are planning on providing these collections of translated template files free of charge to anyone that is interested, so if you have translated MailMan to any language other than English, we are very interested in obtaining the right to redistribute your templates. We don't care if your templates contain your custom branding instead of the original, out-of-the-box blue-and-ripply theme. We think that it's especially cool when people make translations and still use our out-of-the-box theme, but of course that's not necessary. As long as you don't mind us redistributing your branded look, we will make it available. Hopefully we will eventually have several different translations for each of the more common languages. We are also very interested in less common languages though, such as Icelandic or Finnish. Please contact us if you have a translation that you would like to make available. The translation packs will eventually be available from the "Download" section of our web site.

Could MailMan be used for kiosk applications?

We designed MailMan with applications such as standalone kiosks in mind. The only caveat that we would mention is that when you design an interactive kiosk, privacy issues become a big concern. You do not want a user to be able to walk up to a kiosk and see the mail that a previous user was reading. To this end, please be very careful in the selection of an appropriate web browser for kiosk applications. Specifically, please note that the Microsoft Internet Explorer (all known versions 1.0 through 5.x, as of this writing) does not conform to accepted Internet standards for the expiration of web pages from page caches (the "Expires:" HTTP response header, see RFC 1945 for more details on this directive). The Microsoft Internet Explorer also does not conform to accepted Internet standards for directing a browser to not cache web pages in the first place (the "Cache-control:" response header, see RFC 2068 for more details on this directive). Because of these nonconformance issues, Endymion strongly recommends against using any version of the Microsoft Internet Explorer for kiosk applications involving MailMan. Mozilla, Konqurer, Netscape Navigator, Opera, and many other popular web browsers properly conform to Internet communications protocol standards and are very well suited for kiosk applications.