Notes for the debian mailman package.
=====================================

This is the legacy Mailman release
----------------------------------

This package contains the legacy 2.x branch of Mailman. Development
happens in the Mailman 3 suite, available since Debian 10 'Buster'
via the 'mailman3-full' metapackage.

For new installations we recommend to start from the 'mailman3' package.
If you have an existing installation of Mailman 2.x, you can migrate
at your own pace.

This mailman (2.x) package will be kept in working order for the
foreseeable future, but will not see any major changes or improvements.
It will be removed from the first Debian release after Mailman upstream
has stopped support for this branch.

Getting started
---------------

You can access the web interface of mailman on
http://<hostname>/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

You can create new lists with the newlist command (you have to add the
aliases it needs by hand to /etc/aliases or the corresponding database
because mailman can not know about configuration of all MTA's, but newlist 
tells you about the alias it needs, but see the notes on qmail and postfix
below).

For users of exim: if you want to use the /etc/aliases file for mailman
aliases, you'll need to specify a user=list line or something like that in
the system_aliases director.

gate-news is commented out in the default crontab, since most people will be
less interested in gating news-to-mail and vice versa.

An example Apache configuration is included in /etc/mailman/apache.conf.
It can be copied to or symlinked from e.g. the /etc/apache2/conf.d/ directory
(or /etc/apache2/conf-available/mailman in Apache 2.4 and up).

Apache + suexec
---------------

Since suexec forbids execution of CGIs with gid < 50 and www-data (the default
for mailman cgi) is 33, you should execute the cgi with a gid of 50-99 or 65534.
It cannot be any other gid since mailman cgi check that gid < 100 or == 65534.

Qmail
-----
For those using qmail, please see the comments in
/etc/mailman/qmail-to-mailman.py and set it up according to those
instructions. Additional information may be available in
/usr/share/doc/mailman/README.QMAIL.gz

Postfix
-------
For those using postfix who are able to devote a full subdomain
lists.example.com for use by Mailman, please see the comments in
/etc/mailman/postfix-to-mailman.py .

SpamAssassin
------------
As of Mailman 2.1-1, Mailman includes the SpamAssassin patch from
Sourceforge.net.  It is not enabled by default.  If you want to enable
the handler, adding

GLOBAL_PIPELINE.insert(1, 'SpamAssassin')

at the bottom of your mm_cfg.py should enable it. You can read more
documentation about how to configure SpamAssassin and Mailman together at
http://www.daa.com.au/~james/articles/mailman-spamassassin/
The current version of this handler used in this package is released on
2003 May 6 by James Henstridge <james@daa.com.au>.
