Mailman Made Easy
By Steven Champeon
In his first article on installing and configuration mail servers, "Building a High-Volume Newsletter Server," Steven covered Majordomo, one of the most popular command-line mail servers available. In this follow-up article, he looks at Mailman, a GUI-driven utility that makes newsletter administration easy.
Mailman is the free software contender to mail-server products such as Lyris, which feature GUI-driven administration, user-level access to preferences, and built-in archives, digests, and the like. Based on the popular Python programming language, Mailman is intended to be used on UNIX systems, and can be installed alongside Majordomo on the same server, without conflicts. It has a few notable weaknesses, like that it can't easily be made aware of virtual hosts (although with a good dose of Apache configuration and some virtusertable tweaks it could probably be made to work.) I won't discuss that in this article, however, so let's not dawdle.
Installation
To install Mailman, first ensure that the Python interpreter is installed on your server, as Mailman is written in the Python language. You'll need at least version 1.5, although 1.5.1 is recommended, as Mailman expects certain advanced features not present in earlier versions of the language. Download the Mailman 1.1 source from the Web site and unpack it into a temporary directory (such as /usr/local/src). This won't be your final destination directory, so just put the files somewhere where you can delete them later.
