Mailman

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Table of contents

• Introduction to Mailman
• Downloading Mailman
• Mailman Discussion Lists

Introduction to Mailman

Mailman is software to help manage email discussion lists, much like Majordomo and SmartList. Unlike most similar products, Mailman gives each mailing list a web page, and allows users to subscribe, unsubscribe, etc. over the web. Even the list manager can administer his or her list entirely from the web. Mailman also integrates most things people want to do with mailing lists, including archiving, mail-to-news gateways, integrated bounce handling, spam prevention, email-based admin commands, direct SMTP delivery (with fast bulk mailing), support for virtual domains, and more.

Mailman runs on most Un*x-like systems, is compatible with most web servers and browsers, and most SMTP servers. Mailman requires Python version 1.5 or newer. Python is a free object-oriented scripting language. A few files are written in C for security purposes.

The manual is still only a set of READMEs provided in the Mailman distribution. For now, more information can be found at www.list.org.

Downloading Mailman

Mailman can be found on http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/mailman/ or one of the mirrors.

Mailman Discussion Lists

There are several mailing lists devoted to Mailman, which also provide nice demonstrations of Mailman!

• Mailman Announce is a read-only list that you can subscribe to if you are only interested in release notices and other important news. Only the core Mailman developers can post messages to this list.

• Mailman Users is the mailing list to subscribe to if you are using Mailman at your site, and may have problems or questions relating to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep technical discussions off this list.

• Mailman Developers is the mailing list to use if you are interested in helping us develop Mailman, discuss future directions, etc. This is the list for more in-depth technical issues.

• Mailman Checkins is an adjunct list to the publically accessible read-only CVS repository. This list is for the hardcore developers, or anybody else submitting patches, since we really prefer such patches to be generated against the latest snapshot. This is a read-only list; only the core Mailman developers can post messages to this list. There is no archive.

Please send FSF & GNU inquiries & questions to gnu@gnu.org. There are also other ways to contact the FSF.

Please send comments on these web pages to webmasters@gnu.org, send other questions to gnu@gnu.org.

Copyright (C) 1999,2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111, USA

Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.

Updated: Last modified: Sat Oct 26 13:29:25 EDT 2002