Looking for a PHP mailing list App (not for newsletters)
email, mailing-list, mailman, php
Solution
I've actually written some internal software that does this. I believe the term you're looking for is 'discussion list' (as opposed to 'announcement list'). The reason I ended up writing it on my own is because - to my knowledge - a well known software package doesn't exist.
Announcement list - plenty. Discussion lists - no so much.
As an aside, the reason there's not much out there may be because a forum is a much better tool to use. The well known discussion list software has been around for years, developed when people had e-mail addresses, but not always web access.
I'll disagree with Rudism, in that a cron job or a special SMTP server is not needed. Postfix can be rather easily configured to send incoming e-mails to a PHP script, which then processes the mail.
Libraries like Zend_Mail, SwiftMailer make sending email easy. In my experience the hardest part is processing incoming e-mails. However, the popular e-mail libraries have made some progress in that direction (from what I've seen).
My recommendation is use a discussion list service, or a forum (maybe with e-mail notification). If you are set on running your own server, you could write a bare-bones script pretty easily.
Problem
I am not sure if I'm calling this correctly by the right name, what I would like to find (if it exists) is a group mailing list app (like mailman) but in php. Here is what I expect it to do: Allow for users to email `mailinglist@domain.com` with subject like `TEAM123 - Deadline is 11/30/2011` (or maybe just team123@domain.com) and this application would CHECK the mailbox It would check the mailbox, and forward that message to all users in `TEAM123`. So the email thread would then be created. Users then would be notified in `TEAM123`, and by replying, would update the mail thread (the emails would then again go out to everyone). Maybe at this point the app would update a running conversation on the site (store it in DB? etc). I think I'm calling the process properly 'mailing list service' etc.. Anyone aware of anything like this in PHP? I would use this for a sports league, players would just have to update via email and the whole team would be updated. Thanks! Appreciate any ideas on this...