GNU Mailman

GNU Mailman

Command line interface of Mailman
Developer(s)	Barry Warsaw
Initial release	July 30, 1999 (1999-07-30)[1]
Stable release	2.1.14 / September 20, 2010; 13 months ago (2010-09-20)[2]
Development status	Mature
Written in	Mostly Python, some C
Operating system	Unix-like
Available in	Many languages
Type	Mailing lists
License	GNU General Public License
Website	gnu.org/software/mailman

GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU project for managing electronic mailing lists.^[3][4]

Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Barry Warsaw. Mailman is free software, distributed under the GNU General Public License.^[4]

History

A very early version of Mailman was written by John Viega while a grad student, who then lost his copy of the source in a hard drive crash sometime around 1998^[5] Ken Manheimer at CNRI, who was looking for a replacement for Majordomo, then took over development. When Ken left CNRI, Barry Warsaw took over.

Web administration interface for GNU Mailman

Features

Mailman is free software for managing electronic mail discussion and e-newsletter lists. It runs on GNU/Linux and most Unix-like systems, and requires Python 2.1.3 or newer. GNU Mailman works with Unix style mail servers such as Postfix, Sendmail and qmail.

Features include:

• A Web browser interface for list administration, archiving of messages, spam filtering.
• A customizable home page for each mailing list.
• Integrated bounce detection and automatic handling of bouncing addresses.
• Integrated spam filters
• Majordomo-style email based commands.
• Multiple list owners and moderators.
• Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
• Support for virtual domains.
• Web based subscribing and unsubscribing. Users can temporarily disable their accounts, select email digest modes, hide their email addresses from other members, etc.
• Mailing list archiver (Pipermail, the name is visible in the URLs ^[6]) inside the mailing list manager.

See also

Free software portal

• Dada Mail
• Electronic mailing list
• ezmlm
• LISTSERV
• Mailing list
• Majordomo (software)
• Regroup
• Sympa

References

1. ^ Warsaw, Barry A. (30 July 1999). "Mailman 1.0". mailman-announce mailing list. http://mail.python.org/pipermail/mailman-announce/1999-July/000004.html. Retrieved 2008-12-09. 
2. ^ GNU.org
3. ^ "freshmeat.net: Project details for GNU Mailman". http://freshmeat.net/projects/mailman/. Retrieved 2009-02-11. 
4. ^ ^{a b} "Mailman, the GNU Mailing List Manager". http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/. Retrieved 2009-02-11. 
5. ^ "MyMailmanRole — Myriadicity Dot". http://myriadicity.net/Sundry/MyMailmanRole. Retrieved 2009-02-11. 
6. ^ http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.amk.ca/python/unmaintained/pipermail.html

Further reading

Reviews

• Mailing List Management Made Easy
• Running GNU Mailman at home
• Mailman vs Sympa

Other resources

• List Administrator's Guide
• "Mailman – An Extensible Mailing List Manager Using Python"; Ken Manheimer, Barry Warsaw, John Viega; presented at the 7th Internation Python Conference, Nov 10-13, 1998
• "Mailman: The GNU Mailing List Manager"; John Viega, Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer; presented at the 12th Usenix Systems Administration Conference (LISA '98), Dec 9, 1998
• Mailman Users Guide

External links

• Mailman homepage
• Mailman Documentation
• Mailman support mailing lists
• GNU Mailman at Freecode