[systems]

i find topicbox to sound more like a supercharged mailing-list

personally i think mailing-list is the most important communication tool for team work, and i think more organization need to use them

sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...

[ams6110]

Well I was going to say I don't really see how this is much different from e.g. Google Groups. Groups messages go into an archive that is searchable/readable by new members. But just having a message archive isn't really that helpful unless it can be organized further, and that's where it breaks down -- the job of organizing the group archive has all the same problems of keeping the team wiki up to date: its easy to get behind, and the content grows stale or hard to use.

[e12e]

Unless there are any alternative interfaces I'm unaware of, Google group's biggest problem isn't its feature set, but its godawful interface... It feels like someone that never heard of usenet took a look at early version of phpbb and proclaimed: we can do worse!

[ams6110]

LOL yes I do agree, Google Group has an astonishingly bad UI especially considering it's from a company with the resouces of Google.

[brongondwana]

This is exactly why we build topicbox! We like mailing lists, and we want an archive which is useful.

[Kadin]

> sadly the only mailing-list software for windows/exchange i found was commercial, expensive and will be a hard sell ...

Not that I am campaigning against Topicbox, but I think it's worth making clear that just because your email is hosted on Exchange, doesn't mean your mailing list solution needs to be.

You can run, and I have in fact run, mailinglists on top of Mailman / Debian / Postfix / Nginx, in a heterogenous environment where the mailservers were Exchange (and some shitty hosted Exchange run by morons to boot). You can do it without even reconfiguring Exchange if you are willing to put all the lists in a subdomain with its own MX record.

No reason why a hosted solution couldn't work this way as well. If you don't want to have your mailinglists in a subdomain, then you would need mailserver configuration to set up the aliases correctly, and that creates a certain amount of maintenance hassle every time you create a new list, but I've never been convinced that's a worthwhile tradeoff to make. Making mailinglists instantly discernible from humans' addresses isn't necessarily bad.

[systems]

all mailing list software that i found, targeted linux or unix-like operating systems

the only option i found for windows was listserv which cost 2K and up .. getting approval for a $2000+ .. at least where i work, needs a super solid business case ..

i would argue that at this cost, maybe i should as for a linux box, but then again, who will admin that, who will install and admin postgresql (as an example of a dependency of some of those mailing list softwares)

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mailing_list_software)