When the requirement came up for a mailing list manager, I went with Mailman due to it's widespread popularity. This post is an overview of installing Mailman on an Ubuntu/Postfix set-up and managing Mailman lists.

In a nutshell I followed Ubuntu Community Documentation Mailman guide; in particular to how to configure Mailman for Postfix. In this instance, the server was already configured with the necessary prerequisties. Installing Mailman was a matter of installing the package from the Ubuntu repositories then providing configuration specific to Postfix.

In addtion to the instructions in the Ubuntu documentation, I had to ammend the formatting in /etc/postfix/master.cf. A bug effecting the mailman transport settings was preventing mailman from working so I had to modify the entry to contain only single spaces between values as shown:

mailman unix - n n - - pipe

Further information about this bug is discussed here.

Although this is all the HOWTO said that was needed, this instance of Postfix was configured to use virtual domains. The error message Recipient address rejected: User unknown in local recipient table indicated that some further configuration was required. So I had to follow these additional steps from the Mailman Installation Manual. Some of the information is superfluous, but still vital into getting Postfix and Mailman to play nicely. In editing mm_cfg.py, ensure that DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST and DEFAULT_URL_HOST contain the correct values for the server and that POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS is set to your virtual domain.

After modifying Mailman configuration settings, be sure to reload the configuration (and the Postfix configuration if necessary):

sudo /etc/init.d/mailman reload

The most common commands for administering Mailman are:

Adding a new list:

newlist

New lists need to be speficically created by the systems administrator but ownership can be handed over to a list administrator by providing an e-mail address, name and password for the list.

Deleting a list: (adding the 'a' flag also removes all archives):

rmlist -a "'listname"

List existing lists:

list_lists

Typically the admin page for lists is located at http://yourserver/cgi-bin/mailman/admin, in this case http://kruel.org/cgi-bin/mailman/admin.