Mailman

Mailman

Description

Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. Mailman is integrated with the web, making it easy for users to manage their accounts and for list owners to administer their lists. Mailman supports built-in archiving, automatic bounce processing, content filtering, digest delivery, spam filters, and more.

Thanks to Gordon Rowell for developing the rpms.

Installation

wget http://www.gormand.com.au/smeserver/WIP/smeserver-mailman/smeserver-mailman-1.3.0-14.noarch.rpm
wget http://www.gormand.com.au/smeserver/WIP/smeserver-mailman/mailman-2.1.5.1-34.rhel4.3sme01.i386.rpm
yum localinstall mailman-2.1.5.1-34.rhel4.3sme01.i386.rpm smeserver-mailman-1.3.0-14.noarch.rpm

You should now see a Mailman section under the Configuration section of the server-manager.

Configuration

File locations

Location	Description
/var/lib/mailman	location of mailman lists and archives
/usr/lib/mailman	location of mailman program files
/usr/lib/mailman/aliases	location of qmail alias files

Creating lists

Go to http://domain.name/mailman to create new lists.

If your SMEServer has multiple domains configured, do not prepend www. before the virtual domain.

For example: go to http:// virtualdomain.name/mailman to create lists for that domain name.

Command line options

You can do a lot using the command line scripts located in /usr/lib/mailman/bin

For example

/usr/lib/mailman/bin/mmsitepass	will set the master password for all lists
/usr/lib/mailman/bin/list-members [listname]	will list the members of [listname]

Running the script with --help will display the options available

Transferring Lists

You can transfer lists from another server and keep everything in tact. It's an easy process but the Mailman FAQ and info seems to be sparse and complicated. This simplifies everything.

OLD SERVER

First stop the mailman service.

/etc/init.d/mailman stop

Next, tar/zip up the lists.

tar -czvf /temp/mailman.tar.gz /var/lib/mailman

Next, transfer it onto the new server using scp or rsync:

scp -P <sshportnumber> /temp/mailman.tar.gz <newserverip>:/var/lib

or

rsync --progress -te "ssh -p <sshportnumber>" /temp/mailman.tar.gz <newserverip>:/var/lib

NEW SERVER

Change to the rpm location.

cd /install

Install the rpms.

yum localinstall mailman-* smeserver-mailman-*

Extract/untar/unzip the tar/zip file.

tar -xvzf /var/lib/mailman.tar.gz

The rpm should have expanded the httpd configuration file and restarted the service but it hasn't. Small bug. The following reconfigures the httpd/web service (this should be able to be replaced with an event, but I'm not sure which one, yet -if you know, change it or talk it).

expand-template /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf

Now we have to restart it to take effect. Since it's a 'supervised' service, we just have to stop it. It will start again on its own.

/etc/init.d/httpd stop

Finally, start the mailman service.

/etc/init.d/mailman start

All your lists and lists' configurations should now be available at: http://domain.name/mailman

For more information

Mailman website http://www.list.org/ Mailman FAQ http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py?req=all

Current Issues

• Check submitted bugs in the bug tracker under the contrib component "smeserver-mailman"
• Current mailman release is 2.1.9
• Bugzilla:2411: /usr/lib/mailman/aliases and /var/lib/mailman are not currently backed up

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