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Mailman - a mailing list manager 1 March 2006

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Mailman is a mailing list manager. This article will demonstrate how I set up Mailman and converted some mailing lists from Majordomo. I'll be using FreeBSD 6.0-STABLE, Postfix 2.2.7, and MailMan 2.17 but you will probably find these instructions useful no matter that operating system and version you are planning to use.

Mailman has a web component that can be used for subscribing, administration, and archives. I'll be showing how I configured Apache to work with Mailman.

With this solution, I'm making the following assumptions

All mail for your list goes to a specific domain. In my case, lists.freebsddiary.org. I do it this way so that I can easily change the mail server to another host should the need arise. It also simplifies the solution in that all mail for that host goes to Mailman, not to a user.
Postfix is your mail server, and you want to use virtual domains.
You will give unique names to each mailing list. You will not have announce@h1.example.org and announce@h2.example.org. Instead, you will have announce-h1@h1.example.org and example-h2@h2.example.org. Again, this simplifies the solution.

Installation

Installation is a no-brainer. But if you are using anything other than sendmail as your mail server, you'll need to tell Mailman about it. The make options command shows you a lot of things you can tweak. I recommend leaving everything as the default value except for setting the right value for MAIL_GID. Since I'm using Postfix, I'll use the following command for installation:

cd /usr/ports/mail/mailman make MAIL_GID=mailman install clean

That will install mailman and clean up the working files when it is done.

16 April 2006

When it came time to upgrade Mailman at at later date, I found this worked for me:

export MAIL_GID=mailman portupgrade mailman

NOTE: after reinstalling mailman, you need to restart it:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mailman.sh start

In later versions of Mailman, the command is

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/mailman start

NOTE the missing .sh

This point has stumped me more than once. I'd send a message. Nothing happened. Starting up the mailman queue processing helps.

Configuration

This isn't the first time I have set up Mailman. I know I played with it twice before, the latest of which I think was in 2003. At the time, I thought the documentation wasn't very clear in some crucial aspects. In particular, while they may document things well, they don't provide enough practical examples to demonstrate how to use a particular feature. I hope things will go smoother this time.

Be sure to read /usr/local/share/doc/mailman/FreeBSD-post-install-notes.

I started by setting up lists.freebsddiary.org. I'm not going to describe how to set up the DNS. That is outside the scope of this article and I have several articles about DNS. Similarly, I won't tell you how to set up a virtual server in Apache, but you can read something about that. However, the virtual host for this:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerAdmin     dan@langille.org
    
    DocumentRoot    /path/to/www/lists.freebsddiary.org/www
        
    ServerName      lists.freebsddiary.org
            
    ScriptAlias /mailman   "/usr/local/mailman/cgi-bin"
    Alias       /pipermail "/usr/local/mailman/archives/public"
    
    ErrorLog        /path/to/www/log/lists.freebsddiary.org-error.log
    CustomLog       /path/to/www/log/lists.freebsddiary.org-access.log combined
                            
</VirtualHost>

I think the most important document to read is /usr/local/share/doc/mailman/mailman-install.txt. You can also read that document online in HTML form. From that document, I performed these steps.

From Step 4, I ran bin/check_perms. It found nothing wrong.
I'm using Postfix, so I followed "6.1 Using the Postfix mail server" closely. Specifically, I made sure these items were in /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf:
```
recipient_delimiter = +
unknown_local_recipient_reject_code = 550
transport_maps = hash:/usr/local/etc/postfix-config/transport
mailman_destination_recipient_limit = 1
```
Combined with the above, I added the following to /usr/local/etc/postfix-config/transport (NOTE: you can use any file name you want; just be consistent with it.):
```
lists.freebsddiary.org mailman:
```
Remember to process that file first:
```
postmap /usr/local/etc/postfix-config/transport
```
That will create the database file Postfix will use.
I also let Postfix know that it should accept mail for lists.freebsddiary.org by adding this entry to /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf:
```
relay_domains = lists.freebsddiary.org
```
If you already have a relay_domains entry, add to it. Do not replace.
And I added this to /usr/local/etc/postfix/master.cf:
```
mailman unix  -       n       n       -       -       pipe
      flags=FR user=mailman:mailman
      argv=/usr/local/mailman/postfix-to-mailman-2.1.py ${nexthop} ${user}
```
You'll see a reference to postfix-to-mailman.py above. You need to download that manually and install it to the indicated directory. You can get that from http://www.gurulabs.com/goodies/downloads.php. I grabbed the one for Mailman 2.1 version and renamed the file accordingly. I changed some items within the file:
```
#! /usr/local/bin/python

# Configuration variables - Change these for your site if necessary.
MailmanHome = "/usr/local/mailman"; # Mailman home directory.
MailmanOwner = "postmaster@havoc.example.org";
# End of configuration variables.
```
The items I changed are in bold.
And to integrate Postfix and Mailman, I followed "6.1.1 Integrating Postfix and Mailman".
- I added this to /usr/local/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py:
```
MTA = 'Postfix'
```
  I found I didn't need the following entries at all:
```
POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = ['lists.freebsddiary.org']

add_virtualhost(DEFAULT_URL_HOST, DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST)
add_virtualhost('lists.freebsddiary.org','lists.freebsddiary.org')
```
  Those last two entries deal with virtual hosts. But given the script I'm using (postfix-to-mailman.py), perhaps those items are no longer required.
- I checked the values of POSTFIX_ALIAS_CMD and POSTFIX_MAP_CMD in /usr/local/mailman/Mailman/Defaults.py.
- As root, I issued these commands to generate the aliases:
```
cd /usr/local/mailman
bin/genaliases
```
- Followed by these commands to make sure the files are owned by mailman:
```
cd /usr/local/mailman/data
chown mailman aliases aliases.db
chmod g+w aliases aliases.db
```
- I told Postfix about the aliases by adding this to /usr/local/etc/postfix/main.cf:
  hash:/usr/local/mailman/data/aliases
  
  You should add the above directive to any existing alias_maps = directive.
You'll need to restart Postfix and Apache. Check for errors
Create a site-wide mailing list. Following step 8 of the mailman-install.txt, I did this (see later in this step for a better method):
```
bin/newlist mailman
bin/config_list -i data/sitelist.cfg mailman
```
The list creation email that you receive will have the wrong hostname in the URLs. Ignore that point. In a latter step, we'll fix that URL.
You can avoid the fixing step if you specify the email host and web host on the command line:
```
bin/newlist --urlhost=lists.freebsddiary.org \
    --emailhost=lists.freebsddiary.org freebsddiary-announce
```
NOTE: I've split the above into two lines.

Set up the cronjob for mailman:

cd /usr/local/mailman/cron
crontab -u mailman crontab.in

Start the queue processing:

cd /usr/local/mailman
bin/mailmanctl start

If we didn't specify the mail host and web host on the command line, we need to fix the URL for this list:
```
bin/withlist -l -r fix_url freebsddiary-announce --urlhost=lists.freebsddiary.org
```
With the above we change the URL for the list freebsddiary-announce by setting it to lists.freebsddiary.org.
Ignore the incorrect URL in the list correction email. The above command fixes that.

Now you should be able to browse to your mailman interface. Like I can: http://lists.freebsddiary.org/mailman/listinfo

Creating the first list

I will now create the freebsddiary-announce mailing list:

cd /usr/local/mailman
bin/newlist freebsddiary-announce

Shortly thereafter, you should get an email with a list of all the things you need to know.

Problems I encountered

This section outlines some of the problems I encountered and the solution.