1 Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System
2 Copyright (C) 1998-2009 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
6 This is GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system distributed under
7 the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later. The
8 name of this software is spelled "Mailman" with a leading capital `M' but
9 with a lower case second `m'. Any other spelling is incorrect.
11 Mailman is written in Python, a free object-oriented scripting language.
12 Python is available for all platforms that Mailman is supported on, which
13 includes GNU/Linux and most other Unix-like operating systems
14 (e.g. Solaris, *BSD, MacOSX, etc.). It does not run on Windows, although
15 web and mail clients on any platform should be able to interact with
18 Mailman was originally developed by John Viega. Subsequent development
19 (through version 1.0b3) was by Ken Manheimer. Further work towards the
20 1.0 final release was a group effort, with the core contributors being:
21 Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer, Scott Cotton, Harald Meland, and John Viega.
22 Version 1.0 and beyond have been primarily maintained by Barry Warsaw with
23 contributions from many; see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS file for details. Jeremy
24 Hylton helped considerably with the Pipermail code in Mailman 2.0.
25 Mailman 2.1 is now being primarily maintained by Mark Sapiro and Tokio
26 Kikuchi. Barry Warsaw is the lead developer on Mailman 3.
28 The Mailman home page is:
34 http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman
37 You might also be interested in the Mailman wiki at:
41 Mailman 3.0 requires Python 2.6 or greater, which can be downloaded from:
48 **Mailman 3.0 is alpha software and some of this information may be out of
49 date or not currently working. This will improve as the alpha releases
52 Mailman has most of the standard features you'd expect in a mailing list
55 - Web based list administration for nearly all tasks. Web based
56 subscriptions and user configuration management. A customizable "home
57 page" for each mailing list.
59 - Privacy features such as moderation, open and closed list subscription
60 policies, private membership rosters, and sender-based filters.
62 - Automatic web based archiving built-in with support for private and
63 public archives, and hooks for external archivers.
65 - Per-user configuration optional digest delivery for either
66 MIME-compliant or RFC 1153 style "plain text" digests.
68 - Integrated mail/Usenet gateways.
70 - Integrated auto-replies.
74 - Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework.
76 - Integrated spam detection, and MIME-based content filtering.
78 - An extensible mail delivery pipeline.
80 - Support for virtual domains.
85 The default mail delivery mechanism uses a direct SMTP connection to
86 whatever mail transport agent you have running on port 25. You can thus
87 use Mailman with any such MTA, however with certain MTAs (e.g. Exim and
88 Postfix), Mailman will support thru-the-web creation and removal of
91 Mailman works with any web server that supports CGI/1.1. The HTML it
92 generates should be friendly to most web browsers and network connections.
94 You will need root access on the machine hosting your Mailman installation
95 in order to complete some of the configuration steps. See the INSTALL.txt
98 Mailman's web and email user interface should be compatible with just
99 about any mail reader or web browser, although a mail reader that is MIME
100 aware will be a big help. You do not need Java, JavaScript, or any other
106 For information on this alpha release, see docs/ALPHA.txt
108 More documentation is available in the docs directory, and on-line (see
109 below). Installation instructions are contained in the
110 docs/readmes/INSTALL.txt file. Upgrading information is available in the
111 docs/readmes/UPGRADING.txt file. See the docs/NEWS.txt file for a list of
112 changes since version 0.9.
114 The online documentation can be found in
116 file:admin/www/index.html
118 in the directory in which you unpacked Mailman.
120 There is an online FAQ maintained by the Mailman community, which contains
121 a vast amount of information:
123 http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
125 There is a wiki for more community-driven information:
129 The wiki includes the online FAQ maintained by the Mailman community,
130 which contains a vast amount of information:
132 http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions
134 As well as links to further documentation:
136 http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/
138 There are also several mailing lists that can be used as resources
139 to help you get going with Mailman.
142 An list for users of Mailman, for posting questions or problems
143 related to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep
144 technical discussions off this list.
146 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
149 A read-only list for release announcements an other important news.
151 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-announce
154 A list for those of you interested in helping develop Mailman 2's
155 future direction. This list will contain in-depth technical
158 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
161 Get involved now in the development of Mailman 3!
163 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman3-dev
166 A list for the discussion of the Mailman internationalization
167 effort. Mailman 2.1 is fully multi-lingual.
169 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-i18n
172 A read-only list which is an adjunct to the public anonymous CVS
173 repository. You can stay on the bleeding edge of Mailman development
174 by subscribing to this list.
176 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-checkins
178 The Mailman project is coordinated on SourceForge at
180 http://sf.net/projects/mailman
182 You should use SourceForge to report bugs and to upload patches.
188 indent-tabs-mode: nil