Mailman

Installation

You can download mailman from here: http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/download.html

To verify the download using the signature, add the public keys of the developers listed on the download page, and visit Verifying a File using a Detached Signature at my GnuPG page for the verification process.

Pre-Configure Process

You must first create a group named "mailman" on your system, and create a user named "mailman" in the group "mailman".

# groupadd mailman
# useradd --shell /no/shell --home-dir /no/home --gid mailman mailman

Configuration

For my configuration of mailman, I wanted to make a self-contained installation, including moving the /var/mailman directory (which contains mutable mailman data) into the mailman installation directory. This is the reason for the --with-var-prefix option.

#!/bin/sh

./configure \
    --prefix=${HOME}/pkg/mailman/2.1.14 \
    --with-var-prefix=${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var

Before I ran configure, I had to run

$ mkdir -p ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/var
$ /usr/bin/sudo chown mailman ${HOME}/pkg/mailman
$ /usr/bin/sudo chgrp mailman ${HOME}/pkg/mailman
$ /usr/bin/sudo chmod 02775 ${HOME}/pkg/mailman    # <-- the "02" sets UID and GID permissions

(for more info on setting UID and GID permissions, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid)

Once you've created this directory with the correct permissions, do the usual thing:

$ ./runconfigure.sh
$ make -j2
$ /usr/bin/sudo -u mailman make install # <-- must be run as sudo because creating/modifying directories owned by "mailman" user

Checking/Fixing Permissions

It is likely you'll run into problems with the permissions, even if you're careful. However, this can be easily fixed using a mailman script:

# cd ${HOME}/pkg/mailman/2.1.14
# bin/check_perms

(any permissions problems will be displayed here)

# bin/check_perms -f

(any permissions problems will be fixed)

(note that this must be run as the superuser, hence the #'s).

Connecting Mailman with Web Server

I'm using an Apache web server. To get Mailman working with Apache, I had to add the following to the httpd.conf file:

<IfModule alias_module>

    [...]

    # Add a script alias for mailman to run required cgi-scripts
    ScriptAlias /mailman/ "/path/to/apache/cgi-bin/"

    [...]

</IfModule>