Installing Mailman

Fortunately, to make life very easy, there is a copy of the latest Mailman included with RedHat 5.2 or CentOS, so just
yum install mailman
yum update

and you’re on your way.
However, Mailman 2 currently does not support virtual email domains, so I have applied a small patch by hand to add this functionality.

The Mailman Installation Manual is very good and will walk you through all the configuration steps required, which shouldn’t take you more than an hour or two at most. You will find most of it has been done for you by the RPM packagers at RedHat. About the only bits you need to bother with are
  • 7 Review your site defaults
  • 8 Create a site-wide mailing list
  • 11 Check the hostname settings
  • 12 Create the site password
  • 13 Create your first mailing list

If you are moving from Majordomo to Mailman, you may be interested in my majordomo2mailman script which will do all the hard work for you.
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Converting Majordomo Mailing Lists to Mailman

This appears to be a fairly common problem, with very few decent solutions to the problem. It’s all very well converting lists over by hand if you only have a few, but if you have hundreds of them then that is not practical.

So I have taken a script originally written by Brad Marshall (b.marshall@cqu.edu.au) and fixed some bugs, extended it and improved it.

You can download the resulting majordomo2mailman script here.

If you run it as “majordomo2mailman --help” then it will show you how to use it.
You will need to edit the settings at the top of the script to match the layout of your server, as it needs a copy of the Majordomo lists directory and the Majordomo aliases file to work from. I wrote this to work with sendmail, but converting it to work with any other MTA should be trivial, you just need to bash your aliases database into a file that looks like a sendmail one, i.e. one alias per line, with the format
alias: value
on each line.
To start with, you might want to enable debugging, which you can do at the top of the script.

If you use it, I would greatly appreciate a small donation. I have an Amazon.co.uk wishlist. Thank you.

Don’t forget to make the majordomo2mailman script executable after you have downloaded it!
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