[Mailman-Users] Virtual-domain support?

[Jim Popovitch]

Matt England wrote:
> At 1/26/2006 07:47 PM, Jim Popovitch wrote:
>> I run multiple lists with Mailman, been doing so since v1.1 (or was it 
>> 1.2?).  Anyway, virtual domains work for me.  What virtual domain 
>> problem do you have with recent MM versions?
> 
> mylist at domain1.com and mylist at domain2.com (ie, same list name, different 
> domains, different lists/reflectors) will not work for the same Mailman 
> server...or at least, so I'm told.

That depends on a few things.  For starters, does your MTA support 
list at domain1.com AND list at domain2.com?  If it does, then you will need 
to use the virtualization features of your MTA to map each list to a 
unique local email account.  I.E.: in sendmail this would be the 
virtusertable where you would map list at domain1.com to "list-a" and 
list at domain2.com to "list-b".  Your sendmail aliases file would then 
contain entires like this:
  list-a:        "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post list-a"
  list-a-admin:  "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin list-a"
  list-b:        "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman post list-b"
  list-b-admin:  "|/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman admin list-b"

Additionally, using virtualization features of your MTA, you need to 
change sender (outbound) addresses so that email from list-a appears as 
coming from list-bounces at domain1.com not list-a-bounces at domain1.com.  In 
sendmail this is done in genericstable.

At this point you can change each Mailman list settings so that emails 
aesthetically appear as from LIST instead of LIST-A or LIST-B (subject 
line, footer, subscription notice, etc).

The real visible issue may arise in URLs that users will use (i.e. 
http://<server>/mailman/list).  You will need to configure your 
webserver to redirect http://domain1.com/mailman/list to 
http://domain1.com/mailman/list-a  AND http://domain2.com/mailman/list 
to redirect to http://domain2.com/mailman/list-b.  I suppose you could 
also use proxy features of Apache to proxy 
http://domain2.com/mailman/list-b as http://domain2.com/mailman/list and 
the same for list-a.  Shouldn't be too difficult.

NONE of the above will ever completely hide the real list name from 
email headers, but who really looks at those these days?  :-)

Hth,

-Jim P.