1 Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System
2 Copyright (C) 1998-2008 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.
3 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA
7 This is GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system distributed under
8 the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). The name of this
9 software is spelled "Mailman" with a leading capital `M' but with a lower
10 case second `m'. Any other spelling is incorrect.
12 Mailman is written in Python, a free object-oriented scripting language.
13 Python is available for all platforms that Mailman is supported on, which
14 includes GNU/Linux and most other Unix-like operating systems
15 (e.g. Solaris, *BSD, MacOSX, etc.). It does not run on Windows, although
16 web and mail clients on any platform should be able to interact with
19 Mailman was originally developed by John Viega. Subsequent development
20 (through version 1.0b3) was by Ken Manheimer. Further work towards the
21 1.0 final release was a group effort, with the core contributors being:
22 Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer, Scott Cotton, Harald Meland, and John Viega.
23 Version 1.0 and beyond have been primarily maintained by Barry Warsaw with
24 contributions from many; see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS file for details. Jeremy
25 Hylton helped considerably with the Pipermail code in Mailman 2.0.
26 Mailman 2.1 is now being primarily maintained by Mark Sapiro and Tokio
27 Kikuchi. Barry Warsaw is the lead developer on Mailman 3.
29 The Mailman home page is:
35 http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman
38 You might also be interested in the Mailman wiki at:
42 Mailman 3.0 requires Python 2.5 or greater, which can be downloaded from:
46 It is recommended that you use at least Python 2.5.2, the latest release
47 as of this writing (31-Mar-2008).
52 **Mailman 3.0 is alpha software and some of this information may be out of
53 date or not currently working. This will improve as the alpha releases
56 Mailman has most of the standard features you'd expect in a mailing list
59 - Web based list administration for nearly all tasks. Web based
60 subscriptions and user configuration management. A customizable "home
61 page" for each mailing list.
63 - Privacy features such as moderation, open and closed list subscription
64 policies, private membership rosters, and sender-based filters.
66 - Automatic web based archiving built-in with support for private and
67 public archives, and hooks for external archivers.
69 - Per-user configuration optional digest delivery for either
70 MIME-compliant or RFC 1153 style "plain text" digests.
72 - Integrated mail/Usenet gateways.
74 - Integrated auto-replies.
78 - Integrated bounce detection within an extensible framework.
80 - Integrated spam detection, and MIME-based content filtering.
82 - An extensible mail delivery pipeline.
84 - Support for virtual domains.
89 The default mail delivery mechanism uses a direct SMTP connection to
90 whatever mail transport agent you have running on port 25. You can thus
91 use Mailman with any such MTA, however with certain MTAs (e.g. Exim and
92 Postfix), Mailman will support thru-the-web creation and removal of
95 Mailman works with any web server that supports CGI/1.1. The HTML it
96 generates should be friendly to most web browsers and network connections.
98 You will need root access on the machine hosting your Mailman installation
99 in order to complete some of the configuration steps. See the INSTALL.txt
102 Mailman's web and email user interface should be compatible with just
103 about any mail reader or web browser, although a mail reader that is MIME
104 aware will be a big help. You do not need Java, JavaScript, or any other
110 For information on this alpha release, see docs/ALPHA.txt
112 More documentation is available in the docs directory, and on-line (see
113 below). Installation instructions are contained in the
114 docs/readmes/INSTALL.txt file. Upgrading information is available in the
115 docs/readmes/UPGRADING.txt file. See the docs/NEWS.txt file for a list of
116 changes since version 0.9.
118 The online documentation can be found in
120 file:admin/www/index.html
122 in the directory in which you unpacked Mailman.
124 There is an online FAQ maintained by the Mailman community, which contains
125 a vast amount of information:
127 http://www.python.org/cgi-bin/faqw-mm.py
129 There is a wiki for more community-driven information:
133 The wiki includes the online FAQ maintained by the Mailman community,
134 which contains a vast amount of information:
136 http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/Frequently+Asked+Questions
138 As well as links to further documentation:
140 http://wiki.list.org/display/DOC/
142 There are also several mailing lists that can be used as resources
143 to help you get going with Mailman.
146 An list for users of Mailman, for posting questions or problems
147 related to installation, use, etc. We'll try to keep the deep
148 technical discussions off this list.
150 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-users
153 A read-only list for release announcements an other important news.
155 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-announce
158 A list for those of you interested in helping develop Mailman 2's
159 future direction. This list will contain in-depth technical
162 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers
165 Get involved now in the development of Mailman 3!
167 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman3-dev
170 A list for the discussion of the Mailman internationalization
171 effort. Mailman 2.1 is fully multi-lingual.
173 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-i18n
176 A read-only list which is an adjunct to the public anonymous CVS
177 repository. You can stay on the bleeding edge of Mailman development
178 by subscribing to this list.
180 http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-checkins
182 The Mailman project is coordinated on SourceForge at
184 http://sf.net/projects/mailman
186 You should use SourceForge to report bugs and to upload patches.
192 indent-tabs-mode: nil