[Mailman-Users] Newbie requesting basic how-to

[Jon Roland]

This is my first message to the list. I have used listservs for years as an 
ordinary subscriber, but the time has come to set one up on my local Linux 
machine, running Fedora Core 2. I have the latest Mailman installed, by default 
in /var/mailman, but after wending through the volumes of online documentation 
and email archives, and wandering through the files on my system, I am having 
trouble finding what I really need at this point, which is one simple 
instruction for setting it up. What I would really like, of course, would be one 
command:

# Mailman-setup

which would present me with a site administrator GUI that would enable me to do 
everything else. Is there such a thing? I don't want to have to bother with 
running commands from the shell, as I am not a good typist and my vision is 
poor, so I really would like a GUI for almost everything that will save me from 
typos.

My needs are very simple. The machine is not open to the world for access. I 
won't be having anyone on the Internet subscribing. For the time being, it will 
be used entirely as an internal tool, and initially I will subscribe users. 
Later, I might want to let them subscribe themselves, but for now it will be 
used only for announcements to various lists of recipients, going out through 
any of the MTAs we have running, such as postfix, sendmail, or any of the others 
that came with Fedora Core 2, which I see are running now in background, 
although we aren't using them, but using a remote ISP for mail service. We will, 
however, want to send email out to the Internet. We don't have our own local 
domain, so I will need to reconfigure our sender address from 
localhost.localdomain for outgoing email.

So all I will want to do, initially, is have the capability to select a 
recipient list, select a file containing the message body, select the Sender 
field, select the Reply-to field, enter the Subject, perhaps select a file or 
files to be the attachments, and hit Enter to begin sending, with perhaps a time 
delay between messages to avoid overflowing my outbound mail server, whether I 
use a local server or a remote one.

Can anyone provide or point me to simple instructions I can use without spending 
hours or days of study. I just want a quick setup and ease of use for the 
moment. Maybe later I will want to use other capabilities as I develop the need 
and learn how to use them.

I might also suggest that documentation like this should be prominently offered 
on the website. I can't be the only one with this need.

I also note that on the page for the list archive, some of the years offered are 
like 2024 and 2006. Surely your archive is not organized by the date set on the 
sending machine, but by the date email is actually sent.

In case anyone suspects this is for sending spam, it it not. It is in support of 
various non-profit organizations, such as http://www.constitution.org , and 
mainly for things like meeting announcements, press releases, and the like. I 
have examined the other tools I have, like Evolution, but it doesn't seem to 
give me the control or expansion capabilities I want (like being able to change 
my identity from localhost.localdomain).


-- Jon

----------------------------------------------------------------
Starflight Corporation    7793 Burnet Road #37, Austin, TX 78757
512/374-9585 www.the-spa.com/jon.roland/  jon.roland at the-spa.com
Get your free digital certificate from http://www.thawte.com
----------------------------------------------------------------