Is there a good way to migrate from a Mailman list to an web forum?

Question

I have a Mailman managed list with years of history that I want to migrate into a web-based forum. Things it would be nice to do:

• Keep the mailing list going for those who are used to and prefer it to a web interface, but have it integrate with the web-forum activity.

• Take the web-based forum posts, and send them out to the mailing list.

I have run sites based on phpBB, Drupal, Simple Machines, etc., and am able to do a little bit of coding if that was what was required to integrate some package into Mailman, or replace it entirely. But I'm unaware of what is available, commercial, or open-source, that could accomplish this. I am also open to replacing Mailman, if the candidate package can perform its functions reasonably well and integrate well into its own forum.

Answer 1

So far, here's what I've looked into:

Drupal, with its Mailmanager and Listmanager modules, though I've been having trouble turning on the IMAP feature so it can talk to my mail box (clients can access it fine), and the Drupal's forum module isn't really up to the feature level I'd like.

PhpBB, mail2forum, though it looks like currently it only works with the older phpBB version, so not really an alternative for me.

The only one that seems to really "work" is FUDforum and its maillist.php module, which integrates directly at the procmail level, nice. I can take all my Mailman archives and "formmail -ds" them directly into a chosen forum.

I've started a bounty for this issue, I'm looking for something, even commercial, that really integrates the email interface into the forum experience for the end users, particularly the handling of accounts. With FUDforum I'm still going to have to resolve the separation of the Mailman accounts from the FUDforum accounts.

Answer 2

Well, based on what you've said (first, that you're able to do a bit of coding and second that FUDForum would work for you except for the issue of maintaining list membership, have you considered that:

• Mailman stores its user information in a plain text file and
• FUDForums stores its user information in a single sql table

The obvious solution would be to declare one of these master (probably FUDForum, since it looks as if it holds a proper superset of the Mailman info) and have a little script/cron job that copied changes from the master to the slave.

A passing note -- neither of these systems appears very secure (actually, they both look leaky as all get out) and combining them may well reduce the collective security even further. If you are doing anything even remotely confidential you should rethink your goals, and in any case you should take appropriate steps to protect your system from attack.

Answer 3

I know an SME which switched from the mailing list to phpBB! If you want to keep your mailing list, you have also to maintrain it.

Finally the people I know diabled the mailing list service.

Answer 4

Even if the phpBB/mail2forum option is using the older version, it is a nice option. OpenSceneGraph just implemented this for their long running mailing list, and it seems to work flawlessly. It's the only option I've seen that allows for forum posts and mailing list messages to work very seamlessly, and has the means to allow for tags to separate forum subjects from mailing list posts, etc.

Their v2 dev works with phpBB3, too - so if you're willing to live on the bleeding edge, that might be an option.

Answer 5

I ran across this on the web: http://mail2forum.com/

I haven't used it but it looks promising and has both a 1.2 stable version and a 2.0 development version, so it's not a derelict SourceForge project with 1 developer and no commits, or anything :)

Theoretically my org may use it at some point in the next year or two, but we have to finish our own Listserv to Mailman transition first.