[Mailman-Users] Newbie requesting basic how-to

[Mark Sapiro]

Jon Roland wrote:

>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.

It is unclear to me where you are at this point. Have you read the
INSTALL file in the top level of the source distribution and done all
of that?

Are you ready to create a list? If so, you can do pretty much
everything via the GUI list creation/administration pages. See the
README file in the top level of the source distribution

>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?

There is a list administrator GUI but not a site administrator GUI.
However once Mailman is actually installed, the site defaults may well
be fine for you.

>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.

If you are installing from source, you have to do the steps in the
INSTALL document and there's no GUI for that.

>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.

Basically, you create a list through the list create/admin GUI and
subscribe your recipients (or they subscribe themselves). The
Reply-To: is a list option. Most if not all of the rest is
accomplished by sending the desired e-mail to the Mailman list, and
Mailman in turn sends the mail to the list members.

This is generally how "listservs" work.

--
Mark Sapiro <msapiro at value.net>       The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan