Thanks to a recent development push by Alec Mitchell and myself, we've now got mailing lists available to users of the openplans.org community organization website.  I'm very excited that we've got this out the door; as Zack Rosen from CivicSpace has said, if you provide wikis and mailing lists you've pretty much covered about 85% of the organizational needs anywhere.

Our mailing lists are based on Alec's listen product.  Listen is great because, in addition to regular mailing list behaviour, users can browse and participate in the list conversation via a web interface.  It's a bit raw, yet (more on that below), but it's quite a solid foundation.  And I'm finding listen's simplicity quite nice in contrast to the byzantine interface of that other popular python-based mailing list software.

There's still plenty of work to be done, however.  The interface, for instance, isn't nearly as nice or as usable as we'd like.  And, while we don't want to add every bell-and-whistle in the world, there are still a number of core features that aren't in place.  List member management, in particular, is still underdeveloped.  We don't yet allow list owners to manage the list membership (because we're still working on the subscription confirmation code; can't have spammers creating lists and arbitrarily subscribing thousands of users on our hosted service, can we?).  We also don't yet support moderated list subscriptions; anyone is free to subscribe to any list.  These features are on the short list, though, and should be showing up within the next couple of weeks.

If you're interested in using an OpenPlans hosted mailing list for any reason, please feel free to drop by our site and give it a whirl.  First, you need an account.  Then you need to create a project, when the project is created you'll be asked if you'd like mailing list support.  Once the project exists, click on the 'mailing lists' link and then on 'Add mailing list' and you're off.  (If you already have a project on openplans.org, just visit your project preferences to turn on the mailing list support.)

Also, of course, all of the OpenPlans work is open source and available for use by anybody; we'd love to get more people using and contributing to our codebase.  Instructions on getting set up locally are available, please let us know if you have any problems with getting set up.

Cheers, and happy mailing!