When we first started out, our focus was to combine two existing mailing lists which were run using majordomo and Listproc. Whilst both were fine mailing list servers, they were a but unwiedly to setup and Listproc at that time required a paid license which made it expensive.

Around the same time (circa 1996-97), qmail was gaining ground as a small/fast/customisable MTA and of particular interest to us was ezmlm a mailing list manager (MLM) which was easy to setup and had allmost all the features we wanted.

Thus our first mail system consisted of qmail as our incoming/outgoing MTA (mail transfer agent) and ezmlm driving all our mailing lists. We were able to work with ezmlm-idx authors to get some of our specific changes back into upstream code

ezmlm is a no-frills MLM with an email-driven command interface. Bounce management via it’s use of VERP encoded sender addresses eases a lot of admin tasks