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Mailman - A mailing list management system
Copyright (C) 1998 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA
Background
==========
This is Mailman, a mailing list management system written mostly in
Python. Mailman was originally developed by John Viega. Subsequent
development (through version 1.1) was by Ken Manheimer. Currently,
Mailman development is a group effort, led by John Viega, Ken
Manheimer and Barry Warsaw.
Initial version of Mailman (v. 0.9) written by John Viega Dec 12-15
1996. Mailman 1.0b3, 2, and 1.1 developments by Ken Manheimer, 4/98
and 5/98. Autoconf support added 5/98 by Barry Warsaw.
See the Mailman home site for current status, including new releases
and known problems: http://www.list.org
To join the Mailman user's mailing list (recommended) - and to see an
example of a Mailman list interface in action - visit:
http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
To track, and/or participate in, the mailman development crowd:
http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
See file DONE for info on changes since v. 0.9
Features:
o Most standard mailing list features, including:
moderation, mail based commands, digests, etc...
o An extensive Web interface customizable on a per-list basis.
o Web based list administration interface for *all* admin-type tasks.
o*Automatic Web based hypermail-style archives (using pipermail or
other external archiver), including provisions for private archives
o Integrated mail list to newsgroup gatewaying
o Integrated newsgroup to mail list gatewaying (polling-based... if you
have access to the nntp server, you should be able to easily do
non-polling based news->mail list gatewaying; email viega@list.org,
I'd like to help get that going and come up
with instructions)
o Smart bounce detection and correction
o Integrated fast bulk mailing (useful for sendmail users)
o Smart spam protection
o Extensible logging
o Multiple list owners and moderators are possible
o Optional MIME-compliant digests
o Nice about which machine you subscribed from if you're from the
right domain.
* Now missing, but will return soon!
Using Mailman
=============
Requirements:
You must be root on a machine running a mail transport program that
uses an /etc/aliases file, and has a sendmail executable (smail should
be OK). We will soon be switching over to use a direct SMTP
connection to whatever you have running on port 25. The machine
really needs to have a web server in order to configure lists.
Install:
Please see the file INSTALL for details on installing Mailman. In the
instructions that follow, all file paths are assumed to be relative to
the installation directory $prefix.
Adding a new list:
o Run the program bin/newlist
o Visit the list general admin page, and use the descriptions and
the "details" help feature to understand the configuration settings.
List managers, note that:
o Being a list administrator does not entail receiving the traffic -
you have to subscribe, as well.
o Relevant urls - the DEFAULT_URL plus:
- mailman/listinfo/listname for public view of list
- mailman/admin/listname for options
- mailman/admindb/listname for pending requests
- and generally, mailman/listinfo for the list of (public) lists
Troubleshooting:
If from the web you get "document contains no data":
If mail isn't getting delivered:
The cgi wrappers are failing. Either a UID is wrong, or your web
server / mailer has a non-standard name.
If you're unsure about the proper settings, the cgi and mail wrapper
programs use syslog to register mismatches, indicating the correct
setting in the process. You need to have syslog running and
configured to log the mail.error log class somewhere - on sun systems,
the line
mail.debug /var/log/syslog
causes the messages to go to them in /var/log/syslog, for example.
(The distributed syslog.conf forwards the message to the loghost, when
present. See the syslog man page for more details.) If your system
is set like this, if you get a failure trying to visit the
mailman/listinfo web page and it's due to a UID or GID mismatch, then
you should get an entry at the end of /var/log/syslog identifying the
expected and received values.
If the web pages hang:
CERN web servers might leave python's running, and in some cases might
hang the cgi completely. In that case, switch to Apache.
Check ~mailman/logs/error periodically:
Many of the scripts have their stderr logged to ~mailman/logs/error,
and some of the modules write caught errors there, as well, so you
should check there at least occasionally to look for bugs in the code
and problems in your setup.
One thing that is *not* caught by stderr hook is syntax errors!
However, most files can be run from the command line with no effect.
(The ones that will do stuff you want to avoid, like sending out
spurious password reminders, are in the cron dir.) So you can and
should use the python interpreter to check the of any changes before
trying them out.
How to add a new user option
You'll need to do some of these things and not others.
1) Add a flag to mm_defaults.py, and mm_cfg.py.dist if it's
likely to require a custom value for each site.
2) Add an entry to mm_html GetStandardReplacements name
& mapping, to enable referring to the value from mailman html.
3) Add replacements lines to the cgi/options and cgi/listinfo
scripts, to hook the mailman html up with the option.
4) For user-specific options, make SetUserOption calls in
& cgi/handle_opts.
5) For user-specific options, add to 2 data structs at top of
& mm_mailcmd.
6) For user-specific options, add description to mm_mailcmd help
7) Update templates if the options have replacements
8) Use your option wherever appropriate...
Interactive python sessions with maillists
You can do substantial things with maillists from the interpreter!
Include the mailman homedir on your shell python path, or manually
insert it on sys.path from within python, and import Mailman.MailList
and Mailman.Utils from within the interpreter. You can instantiate
the maillist of your choice, eg for a list named postal:
>>> sys.path.insert(0, '/local/mailman')
>>> from Mailman import MailList, Utils
>>> l = MailList.MailList('postal', lock=0)
(Don't set lock=0 if you're going to be changing the state of the
list, eg adding or removing members, etc. However, be aware that
while you're locking it you'll be blocking any other processes that
are trying to obtain the lock - including handling of new postings to
the list, subscriptions, administrative changes, and so forth.)
Now you can examine various aspects of the list:
>>> l.members
['klm@python.org']
>>> l.digest_members
[]
>>> l.real_name
'Postal'
>>> l._internal_name
'postal'
dir(l) will present the components of the list. MailList.py has
the descriptions of many of them, though some are defined in other
modules.
If you want to save changes, 'l.Save()' will do it. It's a real
good idea to play with trial lists, first, before using this
method to do surgery on production lists!
When you do get comfortable with it, you use it and a utility
routine, Utils.map_maillists(), to do batched changes on all
your lists. It takes a function as its argument, and applies that
function to every one of the lists on your system. For instance,
to get the names of all the lists on your system which are
advertised:
>>> def advertised(lst):
... if lst.advertised: return lst.real_name
...
>>> advertised(l)
>>> filter(None, Utils.map_maillists(advertised))
['Mailman-Developers', 'Meta-sig', 'Python-Help', 'C++-SIG', 'Matrix-SIG',
'DB-SIG', 'DO-SIG', 'Doc-SIG', 'GUI-SIG', 'Image-SIG', 'Objc-SIG',
'Plot-SIG', 'Pythonmac-SIG', 'String-SIG', 'Thread-SIG', 'Grail', 'XML-SIG',
'JPython-Interest', 'Trove-Dev', 'Mailman-Users']
If you do list surgery with this mechanism, make really sure that
you're doing what you intend before having the routine do any
.Save()'s.
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