How to install and configure GNU Mailman on Centos 6.2

September 21st at 12:00am

GNU Mailman allows you to setup, administer and maintain email lists. This article shows how to get it setup on Centos 6.2

References

 

Purpose:

We are using the 'iDoneThis' service to help our daily standup meetings to be more effective. Seeing as it is effectively a polished email list i set about to simulate the behavior using GNU Mailman. (In the end we stuck with iDoneThis since it worked better for our non-engineer staff)

 

How to install (Assumes Centos 6.2+)

  • yum install mailman
  • yum install postfix
  • yum install httpd
 

Configure Centos for Mailman

  • Configure postfix / MTA to allow for sending and retrieval of email
  • Ensure iptables has rules that allow traffic over port 80 (web ui) and allows email traffic
  • Run the following comands to ensure that mailman + dependencies start when the server boots:
    • chkconfig --level 2345 mailman on
    • chkconfig --level 2345 httpd on
    • chkconfig --level 2345 postfix on   (Or other MTA if you use one)
       
  • service mailman start  (to start the Mailman server now)
 

How to configure the GNU Mailman system

    • Edit the /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py file
      • Set DEFAULT_URL_HOST to the FQDN used to hit the box over http
      • Set DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST to the domain name where people can send email to
         
    • Edit /etc/httpd/conf.d/mailman.conf
      • Uncomment the last line so it looks something like this:
            •  RedirectMatch ^/mailman[/]*$ /mailman/listinfo



          This ensures that you and your email list users can access the web configuration portal 
  • Set the Mailman admin password:
    •  /usr/lib/mailman/bin/mmsitepass password
       
  • You can check for updates to Mailman by running this command:
    • /usr/lib/mailman/bin/update
      If no updates are available you will see a message indicating No updates are necessary

    •  

  • Run the check_perms command to ensure that permissions are correct
    • /usr/lib/mailman/bin/check_perms
    • If problems are found run check_perms -f
       
  • Import the crontab settings. Warning: This may overwrite all your crontab entries. take a backup first!
    • cd /usr/lib/mailman/cron
    • crontab crontab.in
       
  • You can configure the crontab to set when digests and other messages get sent
    • crontab -e
    • Edit the appropriate mailman lines (crontab entries are well documented)
       

 

 

Create a new Email List

  • From the command line run:
    • /usr/lib/mailman/bin/newlist ListNamehere
    • Follow the prompts
    • Follow the instructions to copy lines to /etc/aliases then run the newaliases command. Your Mailman list will not work without these settings!
       
  • Login via web browser to http://fqdn/mailman and login as an administrator to add people to the list, approve posts, etc...

 

Errata

  • If you are not using a package manager to install Mailman, watch out for the Apache user's GID. Be sure to compile Mailman with awareness of the proper GID (see this page for details)

  • I wasn't able to figure out how to 'whitelist' a user (I only spent an hour on the whole setup) 

  • Looks like there may be a way to 'spice up' mailman by using HTML emails and Digests. Maybe I'll try it out if we get tired of paying for spiffy emails: