Month: August 2012

New Dinj Online

Mat Koya

While I was on Shikoku, I was asked to run the Dinj mailing list.  Dinj stands for German speaking people living or interested in Japan. It was maintained for over 15 years by Michael Engel and the community has expressed their deepest gratefulness for doing so.

The first job was of course the get mailman, the list server software up and running with virtual domains – see the last post. After that Michael transferred the domain to me and now everything is done 🙂 The list is up and running now. One can subscribe here.

The next plan is to add more content to the website and mayeb adding a Wiki later.

Mailman on SnowLeopard Server

Mat Koya

Snow Leopard Server (Mac OS 10.6.x) is until now the most solid server-system from Apple I had up and running. It comes with apache, postfix, dovecot and mailman preinstalled. All the software is well know open source software, but some things were changed by Apple. So the best is to leave the mailman installation as it was shipped by Apple.

Mountain Lion has mailman not preinstalled, so you need to do everything by yourself, like on any other Linux System.

Running mailman on SL Server with virtual domains is not supported by the Apple’s ServerAdmin, so one has to set up things by oneself. This is what I did to get things up and running:

1. I activated mailman in ServerAdmin and created one mailing list, called mailman, this will do the basic setup for Apache and mailman.

2. I edited /private/etc/postfix/main.cf and added:

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/private/var/mailman/data/virtual-mailman

you probably already have a file for virtual aliases so you just can add it:

virtual_alias_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/virtual
hash:/private/var/mailman/data/virtual-mailman

3. I edited: /private/etc/postfix/master.cf and uncommented these lines:

mailman   unix  –       n       n       –       –       pipe
flags=FR user=list argv=/usr/lib/mailman/bin/postfix-to-mailman.py
${nexthop} ${user}

4. I edited /usr/share/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py and added this:

VIRTUAL_HOSTS.clear()
add_virtualhost(‘lists.virtual.com’, ‘virtual.com’)
POSTFIX_STYLE_VIRTUAL_DOMAINS = [‘virtual.com’]

this domain of course also has to be in /private/etc/postfix/virtual_domains, which is created by ServerAdmin

4. restart postfix and mailman via terminal:

sudo postfix reload

sudo  /usr/share/mailman/bin/mailmanctl restart

5.  go to your browser and point it to:

lists.virtual.com/mailman/create

6.  run sudo  /usr/share/mailman/bin/genaliases

and your list should be working.

Two things, you can’t have 2 lists with the same name on different domains and the list name can’t be equal to a short name in your OpenDirectory db.

For Q&A there’s a mailman wiki:

http://wiki.list.org/

and for more tricky question you can subscribe to the mailman mailing list here: http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users

Have fun and enjoy 🙂