[BlueOnyx:03248] Re: Mailman

[Chris Gebhardt - VIRTBIZ Internet]

Darrell D. Mobley wrote:
> I know Chris at Virtbiz has replaced Majordomo with Mailman, although I
> don't know how well he succeeded in the end.

Indeed.   I used information provided on this list, largely from Michael 
S. based on his results running Mailman on the BX listserver.  (See 
[BlueOnyx:02520]).   That got me the basics up and running.

The exact implementation I ran on behalf of a customer took quite a bit 
of tweaking due to the unique nature of the 16 (or so) lists spread 
across 3 domains.  There were a lot of config changes that had to take 
place in order to compensate for the lists coming off of a Plesk system. 
   In addition, some customized procmail scripts were added in to handle 
such tasks as removing "Spam?" tags from subscribed users' submissions, 
rotating paid advertisement banners below user signatures on some lists, 
trimming replies after signatures, and so forth.   We had no fewer than 
4 people involved in the process, with varying levels of documentation.

Long story short(er), although getting Mailman running in an "off the 
rack" mode was fairly straightforward, the steps taken to get to this 
one-off installation are not in a format I could easily make available.

But... it works VERY well.   And if you're starting from scratch, then 
your requirements for all the little customizations that we did... well 
that's out the window.  :)

> My question is, can Majordomo and Mailman co-exist together on the same
> server?

That question I am unable to answer.  We uninstalled Majordomo and 
replaced it completely with Mailman.

I don't think there would be anything really preventing you from doing so.

The major caveat would be that there is NO GUI integration for Mailman. 
  (That would be neat, though!)  So you must manually take care of the 
aliases for Sendmail via CLI.   If you've got a handful of lists to do 
one-off, that's not a big deal.  But the more you do, and the more users 
you put on the server, the more likely you are to run into trouble.

Ideally, an enterprising 3rd party developer would release a Mailman 
replacement for Majordomo that integrates into BX.    Plesk has such an 
implementation.  I would even donate a running Plesk install on CentOS5 
with Postfix if somebody were to want to reverse-engineer or get some 
inspiration from it...

-- 
Chris Gebhardt
VIRTBIZ Internet Services
Access, Web Hosting, Colocation, Dedicated
www.virtbiz.com | toll-free (866) 4 VIRTBIZ