Hosting Electronic Mailing Lists


Mailing lists are a traditional method of asynchronous electronic collaboration. They require no special skills or text formatting abilities from the user, and can serve loads ranging from a small workgroup on a specific project to a global membership of thousands, even millions, of people interested in discussing the World Cup every four years. They are easy to administer, especially if the membership does not change much over time, and can help a website owner draw traffic with a touch of community.

The concept of an automated list is pretty simple: a list is an organized discussion among a group of people. To initiate a discussion (or thread), you can send a single message to the list management software, which then reflects the message to all list subscribers; that is, the people interested in the discussion.

Over the years, there have been several list management tools in use: L-Soft's Listserv, majordomo, and Lyris, to name some of the best known. Recently, an open source package called Mailman has pulled an increasing share of the traffic.

For users, Mailman provides a consistent, web-based interface for managing their own participation, including subscribing/unsubscribing, getting a daily digest of postings, accessing the list archives, turning off the list for vacations, and so on. List administrators get many automated tools that make their jobs easier and less time consuming. Mailman is one of two list-management tools included in SUSE Linux (the other is majordomo).

Mailman keeps track of all subscribers and watches for (and deals with) bouncing messages to some subscribers. It also generates the list archives, if the administrator asks it to.

There is always at least one administrator or moderator for any list perhaps that is you. That person has access to a special, password-protected administrative web page; there, you can perform your list-god duties, such as

  • Manually adding or deleting members, either because you're a nice person or your hand has been forced.

  • Writing a Welcome message for new list members with the list ground rules.

  • Setting the level of moderation for the list: Do you want to inspect every incoming message, or maybe just a new person's first few postings to certify they're not a spammer in disguise.

  • Removing offensive messages from the archives.

Installing Mailman

YaST does most of the installation tasks, but there are a few configuration steps you must take before you can create a new list on your own system. These steps are explained in the /usr/share/doc/packages/mailman/README.SuSE file. The SUSE team assumes you are using Postfix as your MTA (see Chapter 15) and Apache as your web server (see Chapter 26).

  1. In YaST's sysconfig editor (under System), go to Network, Mail, Mailman. (You can also edit /etc/sysconfig/mailman directly.) Identify the following items:

    • MAILMAN_SMTPHOST

    • MAILMAN_DEFAULT_NNTP_HOST

    • MAILMAN_DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST

    • MAILMAN_DEFAULT_URL_HOST

    • MAILMAN_VIRTUAL_HOSTS

      and run SuSEconfig -module mailman.

  2. Call /usr/lib/mailman/bin/mmsitepass as user root to set your site master password.

  3. As root, edit /etc/postfix/main.cf. At the bottom of the file, you will see that YaST has already configured a default alias map: alias_maps = hash:/etc/aliases, ...,

  4. Add this statement to the line: hash:/var/lib/mailman/data/aliases.

  5. Return to the root shell and reload postfix with this command: postfix reload.

  6. Finally, call /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist mailman as user root to create the master mailing list. This list is needed for the inner workings of Mailman. You will be asked to set up a password as the site administrator; make it easy to remember, but relatively hard to guess.

Now you can use the web interface to set up your list.

Tip

Need a host for your Mailman list? You can find a directory of free and commercial hosts at the Python-friendly Web Hosting page: http://www.python.org/moin/PythonHosting. Look for Mailman in the Services Offered column.


Running a Mailman List

Mailman files are stored in /usr/lib/mailman/bin. They are owned by root, but all members of the Mailman group have execute rights and can run Mailman commands, using either the web interface or from the shell.

Open your browser to http://localhost/admin to see the Mailman web interface. Now you can create and administer lists.

To run Mailman shell commands, change directories to /usr/lib/mailman/bin and then run your command. For example, to create a new list, type the following:

./newlist 

The dot-slash is there because the commands are purposely left out of your path for security reasons.

When you create a new list, you'll be prompted to name the list (use all lowercase letters) and give the email address of the list owner. Mailman will send a confirming email to the owner you name. You establish the initial list password in this sequence as well.

You can find the documentation for Mailman in /usr/share/doc/packages/mailman. You'll find README files that cover potential problems with various mail transfer agents and operating systems and the current Frequently Asked Questions list. More formal documentation, tailored to different types of users, is at http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/docs.html. You can read this online or download the PDF or plain-text versions.



SUSE Linux 10 Unleashed
SUSE Linux 10.0 Unleashed
ISBN: 0672327260
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 332

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