[This section, obviously, is under development.  Help me out, please]

A frequent question about MLM's is "Can I run one on my Mac?"  Or, "What's
available for a PC?"  Or, "How about Brand X Unix?"  Here are some listings
of what's available by platform.  For information on where to find them,
etc., see the more detailed references at the end of the FAQ.

(asbestos shorts time) To me, MLM's for Mac-OS and DOS are like piano-playing
poodles -- I'm reluctant to evaluate them in terms of performance because
it's remarkable that they work at all.  In the first place, both OS's crash
too much to make good servers; in the second, their multitasking is weak or
non-existent.  But if you have very limited needs for an MLM and you
absolutely don't want to deal with a new operating system -- and that
certainly is a legitimate concern -- check out these packages: for DOS, the
"Smof Listserver"; for the Mac, MailShare (which, while not an MLM proper, is
said to provide MLM functions -- check sumex-aim.stanford.edu, I haven't seen
it myself). Peter Lewis, who has written several Mac TCP/IP programs, is supposed to be working on a new Mac MLM as well, which will be nice
to see.  If you have a NetWare server, you may want to check out the Mercury
Mail Transport System, which includes an MLM called MAISER.

If you just want to run your MLM on PC hardware, you have many choices.  The
easiest thing is to run Unix on your PC -- Linux (which is free), BSDi, SCO,
Solaris, and NeXT are some of your choices.  Once you run Unix, you can run
most of the packages on this list.  Alternatively, you can run Windows NT,
for which LISTSERV is available and ListProc support has been pre-announced.
OS/2 is a solid operating system and should also be an option, but I don't
know of any MLM's running under it.  Please write me if you do.

If you have a bizarre flavor of Unix, there's still a good chance that
SmartList will run on it, out of the box.  If not, the two Perl packages
(Majordomo and BMW) shouldn't be too hard to port if you have Perl and
Sendmail available.

On IBM mainframes, your choice is LISTSERV, which runs only under VM/CMS.

Under VMS, you have a choice between LISTSERV, MX, and PMDF Mailserv (sold by
Innosoft, but about which I know nothing more -- someone, please fill me in).