Downloading Mailman

You must have a mail server (MTA) that you can send messages to, and a web server that supports the CGI/1.1 API. Apache makes a fine choice for web server, and MTAs such as Postfix, Exim, Sendmail, and qmail should work just fine.

You will need an ANSI C compiler to build Mailman's security wrappers. The GNU C compiler gcc 2.8.1 or later is known to work well.

You must have the Python interpreter installed somewhere on your system. Currently Python 2.1 or newer is required, with Python 2.3.3 being recommended. Mailman should work with latest patch release on any Python branch from 2.1 to 2.3, which as of this writing (31-Dec-2003) is Python 2.1.3, Python 2.2.3, and Python 2.3.3.

Downloading

Mailman is available from the following sources:

If you're using a command line FTP client, be sure to set the mode to binary. Once you've downloaded the source tarball, you can unpack it with the following commands:

% cd /usr/local/src
% tar zxf mailman.tar.gz

Note that the file name may have the version number in it, e.g. mailman-2.1.tar.gz.

Mailman's tarball unpacks into a directory called mailman-xyz where xyz is the version number. Note also that some versions of tar don't accept the z option. In that case, you'll need to use the gunzip program like so:

% gunzip -c mailman.tar.gz | tar xf -