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Contributed by David Champion <dgc@uchicago.edu>
See also ../README.SENDMAIL
What?
-----
Mm-handler is a mail delivery agent (MDA) -- a "mailer", in Sendmail
lingo. Its function is to assume authority for messages destined to
Mailman lists, so that they're off sendmail's hands, and you (the site
administrator) don't need to maintain databases of aliases and such. It
takes a small bit of work to set up, but once that's done, you'll never
need to mess with aliases for Mailman's sake again.
When?
-----
The only further catch is that mm-handler is only really useful when
it mostly "owns" its mail domain (the hostname part after an e-mail
address's "@" symbol) -- when you can dedicate the mail domain to
Mailman. If you have a limited set of exceptions -- a few users, for
example -- you can still use it, but for sites with a dynamic or even
mix of users (or forwarders) and lists, it might not gain you much.
How do you know whether mm-handler is appropriate for you? Let's look
at some examples. If you're running lists off your primary DNS domain
name, you probably have a mix of lists and users in your namespace. Take
python.org, for example: it hosts Mailman lists, and it hosts users'
personal accounts. There aren't a whole bunch of either, but the ratio
is probably fairly near 1:1. Mm-handler is not very useful here, because
there's no simple way to separate user addresses from list addresses --
not to mention that mm-handler is written in perl, so that's just bad
form.
This begs two different, complementary situations. A hypothetical
domain, incidents.int, is used mostly for mailing lists. It's a
front-end site, and not a general user mail service. There might be
a couple of user addresses -- system administrators and such -- but
these are few in number and easily adjusted manually by the site
administrator. The 250 mailing lists at the site are much more dynamic,
and a much bigger pain to keep track of by editing an alias file. This
site can easily benefit from mm-handler.
Inversely, mail.aero, another hypothetical domain, provides POP mail
service to employees of the aerospace industry. Its addresses are
almost entirely users, although it maintains a few mailing lists for
convenience. This site has nothing to gain from mm-handler. It's much
easier to maintain an alias file of 10 lists than to dedicate the domain
to Mailman, and put all 10,000 aerospace workers in a user table.
Those are the trickier cases. The case where mm-handler really works
best is when you can dedicate a single hostname under your DNS domain
to mailing lists, and host no user accounts there. At the University of
Chicago, we do this with listhost.uchicago.edu. SourceForge does this,
too, although I don't believe they use Sendmail.
If your site is like that, you should read on.
How?
----
Set-up isn't all that complicated. I've included a file here called
"mailman.mc". This is the m4 file that I use on my list server, and you
can likely use it with few changes at your site. It's well-annotated;
the rationale for each parameter (or set of parameters) is provided in
m4 (ahem) comments.
So, the simple steps are as follows:
1. Copy mailman.mc, and make any changes you need at your site. You
DEFINITELY need some changes. There are hostnames in there that you
need to adjust, and chances are that you'll need to change some other
parameters (like the host OS), too. [1]
2. Install mm-handler. Because my server's sendmail-related files live
in /etc/mail, I keep mm-handler there, too. YMMV.
3. Edit mm-handler, and make any changes you need at your site. You
probably want to change $MMWRAPPER and $MMLISTDIR at line 14, and you
*might* want to take a look at the helpful boilerplate text beginning
at line 64. (This text is sent whenever someone tries to send mail to
a nonexistent list address on your mail domain.)
4. You should set up a virtusertable. (See mailman.mc for an
explanation.) There's an example of a good, minimal virtusertable
in this distribution. The virtusertable begins as a text file named
"virtusertable", stored in the same directory as all the other
Sendmail files, but it's converted to a map file for Sendmail's use.
Install the virtusertable, and (re)make the map file. [2]
5. You absolutely must have a mailertable, or all of this goes nowhere.
Like virtusertable, the mailertable is a map that begins as text and
gets converted. It's named "mailertable", and it's probably pretty
simple. Mine looks like this:
listtest.uchicago.edu mailman:listtest.uchicago.edu
This says: assign all incoming mail (that was not intercepted by the
virtusertable) and that is in the listtest.uchicago.edu domain to the
"mailman" mailer, and tell the "mailman" mailer that the hostname
we're using is "listtest.uchicago.edu". You can support multiple
virtual hosts using mm-handler just by placing corresponding lines in
mailertable.
Be sure to make this map, too!
6. The mailer definition (see the end of mailman.mc, or your own .mc
file) for mm-handler sets the user/group that mm-handler will run
under. (I use mailman:other.) Be sure that mm-handler is executable
by this user or group. You almost certainly need the user to be the
same as the Mailman user, and this user is almost always called
"mailman", so you probably shouldn't change the defaults.
7. Generate your new sendmail.cf file. See the sendmail documentation if
you're not familiar with this procedure. [1]
8. Stop sendmail on your list server, if you haven't already. Install
the new sendmail.cf file wherever your sendmail.cf file belongs.
(This depends on how sendmail was compiled, but most systems support
using /etc/sendmail.cf.)
9. Cross your fingers and restart sendmail.
A. Barry warns that Mailman now needs you to modify your
Mailman/mm_cfg.py file, adding this line:
MTA = None
This tells Mailman that it doesn't need to do anything special when
it creates or deletes mailing lists through the web. For more
information, take a look at the comments for this variable in your
Defaults.py file (but never edit this file -- always edit mm_cfg.py
instead!).
That's it! With any luck, you're fully functional.
--
[1] The .mc file is the standard, supported way of configuring sendmail.
I'm not going to get into this here, and I'm not going to tell
you how to write raw sendmail.cf stuff, because if you need to do
it this way then you need something more comprehensive than I can
provide. If you need help with the .mc -> .cf process, I recommend
these links:
http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/setup1.html
http://www.sendmail.org/~ca/email/doc8.9/README.cf.html
http://www.hserus.net/sendmail.html
[2] This is often done with something like "makemap hash
/etc/virtusertable </etc/virtusertable", but it could be different
on your server. Consult the sendmail documentation if you do not
know.
--
$Id: mm-handler.readme 4287 2001-10-27 02:30:51Z bwarsaw $
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