Mailman

Ron McCarty

Despite the ever-increasing pace of the Internet evolution, many of us turn to email lists to supply professional advice, keep us up-to-date on news, and interact with others with common interests. Network administrators often need to support mailing lists within organizations. Majordomo (http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/) may be the mailing list manager that comes to mind for most admins; however, there are alternatives available such as Mailman (http://www.lists.org), which I will examine this month.

Mailman is a list manager written in the Python language (it requires version 1.52 or later) and is supported on most versions of UNIX. Mailman supports multiple list managers to ensure the systems administrator does not get caught up in the day-to-day running of the mailing lists. Mailman also supports a Web-based management for list managers and subscribers, as well as Web-based archiving.

Mailman can be downloaded from:
http://www.list.org/mailman.tar.gz

or, if you prefer ftp:
ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/

The installation instructions covered here are for Red Hat 6.2, with other versions being very similar. I will, however, point out where Red Hat's features make the installation easier or more difficult. Apache (or another Web server) is required for the installation, and some Apache configuration is required and covered here.

Place the downloaded distribution into the directory structure where source code is stored. On Linux, I prefer /usr/local/src/. Unzip and untar the distribution:

cd /usr/local/src
gunzip mailman.t