Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System Copyright (C) 1998-2007 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc. 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA INTRODUCTION This is GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The name of this software is spelled "Mailman" with a leading capital `M' but with a lower case second `m'. Any other spelling is incorrect. Mailman is written primarily in Python, a free object-oriented scripting language. Python is available for all platforms that Mailman is supported on, which includes GNU/Linux and most other Unix-like operating systems (e.g. Solaris, *BSD, MacOSX, etc.). It does not run on Windows, although web and mail clients on any platform should be able to interact with Mailman just fine. Mailman was originally developed by John Viega. Subsequent development (through version 1.0b3) was by Ken Manheimer. Further work towards the 1.0 final release was a group effort, with the core contributors being: Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer, Scott Cotton, Harald Meland, and John Viega. Version 1.0 and beyond have been primarily maintained by Barry Warsaw with contributions from many; see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS file for details. Jeremy Hylton helped considerably with the Pipermail code in Mailman 2.0. Mailman 2.1 is now being primarily maintained by Mark Sapiro and Tokio Kikuchi. Barry Warsaw is the lead developer on Mailman 3. The Mailman home page is: http://www.list.org with mirrors at: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman http://mailman.sf.net You might also be interested in the Mailman wiki at: http://wiki.list.org Mailman 3.0 requires Python 2.5 or greater, which can be downloaded from: http://www.python.org It is recommended that you use at least Python 2.5.1, the latest release as of this writing (08-May-2007). FEATURES Mailman has most of the standard features you'd expect in a mailing list manager, and more: - Web based list administration for nearly all tasks. Web based subscriptions and user configuration management. A customizable "home page" for each mailing list. - Privacy features such as moderation, open and closed list subscription policies, private membership rosters, and sender-based filters. - Automatic web based archiving built-in with support for private and public archives, and hooks for external archivers. - Per-user configuration optional digest delivery for either MIME-compliant or RFC 1153 style "plain text" digests. - Integrated mail/Usenet gateways. - Integrated auto-replies. - Email commands. - Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework. - Integrated spam detection, and MIME-based content filtering. - An extensible mail delivery pipeline. - Support for virtual domains. REQUIREMENTS The default mail delivery mechanism uses a direct SMTP connection to whatever mail transport agent you have running on port 25. You can thus use Mailman with any such MTA, however with certain MTAs (e.g. Exim and Postfix), Mailman will support thru-the-web creation and removal of mailing lists. Mailman works with any web server that supports CGI/1.1. The HTML it generates should be friendly to most web browsers and network connections. You will need root access on the machine hosting your Mailman installation in order to complete some of the configuration steps. See the INSTALL.txt file for details. Mailman's web and email user interface should be compatible with just about any mail reader or web browser, although a mail reader that is MIME aware will be a big help. You do not need Java, JavaScript, or any other fancy plugins. FOR MORE INFORMATION More documentation is available in the docs directory, and on-line (see below). Installation instructions are contained in the docs/readmes/INSTALL.txt file. Upgrading information is available in the docs/readmes/UPGRADING.txt file. See the docs/NEWS.txt file for a list of changes since version 0.9. The online documentation can be found in file:admin/www/index.html in the directory in which you unpacked Mailman. There is an online FAQ maintained by the Mailman community, which contains a vast amount of information: http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py There is also a wiki for more community-driven information: http://wiki.list.org Chris Kolar has made a list owner-oriented manual available from the following URL http://www.imsa.edu/~ckolar/mailman/ There are also several mailing lists that can be used as resources to help you get going with Mailman. Mailman-Users An list for users of Mailman, for posting questions or problems related to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep technical discussions off this list. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users Listowners This mailing list with a non-technical focus, specifically for discussions from the perspective of listowners and moderators who do not have "shell access" to the mailing list server where the Mailman software runs. http://listowner.org Mailman-Announce A read-only list for release announcements an other important news. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-announce Mailman-Developers A list for those of you interested in helping develop Mailman 2's future direction. This list will contain in-depth technical discussions. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman3-Dev Get involved now in the development of Mailman 3! http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman3-dev Mailman-I18N A list for the discussion of the Mailman internationalization effort. Mailman 2.1 is fully multi-lingual. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-i18n Mailman-Checkins A read-only list which is an adjunct to the public anonymous CVS repository. You can stay on the bleeding edge of Mailman development by subscribing to this list. http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-checkins The Mailman project is coordinated on SourceForge at http://sf.net/projects/mailman You should use SourceForge to report bugs and to upload patches. Local Variables: mode: indented-text indent-tabs-mode: nil End: