Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System Copyright (C) 1998,1999,2000,2001 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA INTRODUCTION This is GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system distributed under the GNU Public License (GPL). The name of this project is spelled "Mailman" with a leading capital `M' but with a lower case second `m'. Mailman is written primarily in Python, a free object-oriented scripting language. There is some ANSI C code for security purposes. Mailman was originally developed by John Viega. Subsequent development (through version 1.0b3) was by Ken Manheimer. Further work towards the 1.0 final release was a group effort, with the core contributors being: Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer, Scott Cotton, Harald Meland, and John Viega. Version 1.0 and beyond have been primarily maintained by Barry Warsaw with contributions from many; see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS file for details. Jeremy Hylton has helped considerably with the Pipermail code in Mailman 2.0. The Mailman home page is http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman.html which is mirrored at http://www.list.org Mailman requires Python 1.5.2 or greater, which can be downloaded from http://www.python.org It should work fine with Python 1.6 and 2.0. You will also need an ANSI C compiler; gcc (the GNU C compiler) works just fine. Mailman currently works only on Unix-alike operating systems (e.g. Solaris, GNU/Linux, etc.). See the INSTALL file for installation instructions. If you are upgrading from a previous version of Mailman, you need to read the UPGRADING file for important information. FEATURES Read the NEWS file for a list of changes since version 0.9. Read the TODO file for our (extensive) wish list. You can see Mailman in action at http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo Mailman has most of the standard features you'd expect in a mailing list manager, and more: - Web based list administration for nearly all tasks. Web based subscriptions and user configuration management. A customizable "home page" for each mailing list. - Privacy features such as moderation, open and closed list subscription policies, and private membership rosters. - Automatic web based archiving built-in with support for private and public archives, and hooks for external archivers. - Per-user configuration optional digest delivery for either MIME-compliant or RFC 934 style "plain text" digests. - Integrated mail/Usenet gateways. - Integrated auto-replies. - Majordomo-style email based commands. - Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework. - Integrated spam detection. - An extensible mail delivery pipeline. - Support for virtual domains. REQUIREMENTS The default mail delivery mechanism uses a direct SMTP connection to whatever mail transport agent you have running on port 25. You can thus use Mailman with any such MTA, however the script bin/newlist still generates sendmail style aliases (this will be fixed eventually). You can also configure Mailman to submit messages to your MTA via command line invocation, although there are security considerations in going that route. Mailman works with any web server that supports CGI. The HTML it generates is pretty pedestrian and stingy on the graphics so it should be friendly to most web browsers. You will need root access on the machine hosting your Mailman installation in order to complete some of the configuration steps. See the INSTALL file for details. GETTING STARTED QUICKLY These instructions assume that you are sitting in a shell in the install directory (by default /home/mailman). Once you've installed Mailman according to the INSTALL file, you can create your first list by running the program bin/newlist. bin/newlist will print out some aliases that you should add to your /etc/aliases file (if you're running a sendmail compatible MTA; see the various README files for more specific information). Next you should visit the your new list's admin page and set the various configuration options that you want. FOR MORE INFORMATION The online documentation can be found in file:admin/www/index.html in the directory in which you unpacked Mailman. Chris Kolar has made a list owner-oriented manual available from the following URL http://www.aurora.edu/~ckolar/mailman/ There are also several mailing lists that can be used as resources to help you get going with Mailman. Mailman-Announce A read-only list for release announcements an other important news. http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-announce Mailman-Users An open list for users of Mailman, for posting questions or problems related to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep technical discussions off this list. http://www.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Mailman-Developers An open list for those of you interested in helping develop Mailman's future direction. This list will contain in-depth technical discussions. Mailman-I18N An open list for the discussion of the Mailman internationalization effort. Multi-lingual patches are available and will be integrated into the standard distribution after the 2.0 release. Mailman-Checkins A read-only list which is an adjunct to the public anonymous CVS repository. You can stay on the bleeding edge of Mailman development by subscribing to this list. The Mailman project is coordinated on SourceForge at http://sourceforge.net/projects/mailman You should use SourceForge to report bugs and to upload patches. Local Variables: mode: indented-text indent-tabs-mode: nil End: