[conspire] Mailing Lists: Mailman 2 -> Mailman 3, or something different? [was some other subject]

[Rick Moen]

Elise, I hope you won't mind if I share this.

Quoting Elise Scher (elise.scher01 at gmail.com):

> Hi Rick,
>      Thank you for your answer.
>       What is an MTA please?

Mail Transfer Agent -- the software daemon on a mail server that sends
and receives SMTP e-mail as a peer to other MTA daemons on other mail
servers.  Which refers, for example, to the Exim4 MTA running on
linuxmafia.com, which is a peer with other SMTP servers all around the
Internet including the Google GMail server that receives my mail to you
and holds it for your access.

Here is an at least reasonable tutorial explanation, with a schematic
diagram, showing where the MTA fits in:
https://ccm.net/apps-sites/email/9999-how-email-works-mta-mda-mua/

The diagram (and text) is rather old-school, in the sense that it
assumes the user runs a local e-mail client that communicates with the
MTA host using the POP3 or IMAP delivery protocols to retrieve inbound
bundles of mail into a local mail client (a "Mail User Agent" = MUA),
such as Thunderbird or Eudora.

In your case, I think it extremely likely that you are reading &
interacting with GMail using its hosted Web interface, instead (because
almost all GMail users do).  Webmail is a wrinkle not explained in that
page & diagram.

Yet, I recommend it as one that will clarify what an MTA is, what an MUA 
(mail user agent) is, and what a Mail Delivery Agent[1] (the place in the
process that serves POP3/IMAP access for the user) is.

(To be honest, that page was a somewhat random search result on my part.
I'm not screening for quality.)


[1] We don't need to confuse things by distinguishing an MDA from an LDA 
= Local Delivery Agent, but for people familiar with procmail, that's a 
classic LDA, doing delivery _locally_ on the MTA host for Unix greybeards
like me who like their mail left _on_ the server, thank-you-very-much.