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My hosting company doesn't want to support Mailman any longer - they claim mailing lists are passé and not maintained. (BS - Mailman was last updated as of this post in August 2016.)

They suggested Mail Chimp, but that's not the same at all - I want ALL members of my list to be able to send email to one address and have it sent to all members. AFAIK, that's not possible with Mail Chimp, Constant Contact, etc. - all they allow is for the list owner to send out emails. Some members want a daily digest, others want the emails as they get sent. An archive of past emails is also desired. You know; everything that a mailing list like Mailman is designed to do.

They also suggested that I could get a Virtual Private Server if I want to run Mailman - yeah, like I can afford that! Or have time to maintain it - that's what I pay them for.

Their last suggestion was to set up an address that forwards to everyone. But that still doesn't give me digest, archives, etc.

So, what are my real options, besides hitting my hosting support team up side the head and get them to do their job? Yahoo and Google groups exist of course, but am looking for something that can reside in my hosting and use an email address from my URL. Is there anything that can be run as part of my shared hosting?

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  • I would suggest telling them that you consider this a deal breaker - in fact if it is a part of the terms of service that you signed up to then they may be in breach of contract and if they don't respond well start looking for a hosting company that has some idea what customers need.
    – Steve Barnes
    Commented Nov 20, 2016 at 7:55
  • Thanks. That's kind of where it stands - whether I change hosts or not. Between buyouts and mergers, have seen their service slip over the years.I guess at some point, old out-dated technologies do get dropped (Windows 95, the floppy,
    – George Langley
    Commented Nov 23, 2016 at 22:23
  • Why do you want to run this on shared hosting per se?
    – William
    Commented Nov 11, 2018 at 17:37

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This is a good question and I'm surprised it hasn't got more upvotes if not answers.

Resource Utilisation

Many hosting companies seem to dislike Mailman because of resource utilisation issues but this probably depends on the number of mailing list members and mailing lists. Ideally hosting companies should only care about resource utilisation and not what you actually want to do with your resources (within reason).

Alternative Host

Searching for an alternative hosting company might be a solution and there are Mailman friendly hosts.

Alternative Mailing List Management Software

There don't appear to be many MailMan alternatives that can easily be installed on shared hosting.

The exception seems to be Dada Mail which can be installed on various shared hosting services including SiteGround.

It looks like you'd need to install the Bridge plugin to enable discussion functionality like Mailman.

Mailster

Another option is Mailster which is a free extension for the Joomla Content Management System. It might be onerous to install and maintain an entire CMS just for one extension but some hosts (e.g. SiteGround) can be set up to apply Joomla updates automatically so you wouldn't necessarily have to do much maintenance on the CMS. Update: You could also install Auto Update for Joomla to keep Joomla automatically updated.

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