[Mailman-Users] Leopard Server Mailman Config Question

[Larry Stone]

On Mon, 12 Nov 2007, Jerry Britton wrote:

> Have Leopard Server up and running. Have web access to Mailman up and
> running. Have created a test list.
>
> Should the Mailman software create the accounts required for the list
> (list, list-join, list-leave, etc.)?
>
> If so, mine didn't. I posted to the list and got a user unknown error.

They're not accounts, they're aliases that pipe the mail to the mailman
wrapper.

With that simple comment, let me go into more detail. But first, while I'm
one of the Mac OS X "experts" here, my experience is all with OS X
"client" and none with OS X Server (yes, it's quite easy to run server
stuff on what is officially just the client version). Running it on
regular OS X involved installing and building from source as what Apple
provides for Mailman is only with OS X Server.

I wrote (and you should be able to find in the archives) a post on
installing Mailman on Tiger client (and earlier Panther client; a Leopard
client version may be coming). It may be useful to you in understanding a
little of what is going on behind the scenes but then, since we know
little about Apple's customizations for OS X Server, it might not.

Apple provides Postfix as the included MTA (with both Server and client).
Mailman "knows" Postfix and when properly configured in mm_cfg.py, creates
the needed aliases automatically. The only other thing is to make sure
Postfix knows about Mailman's alias file. On my system (set up using my
instructions reference above), the Mailman alias file is
$prefix/data/aliases (where $prefix is your Mailman home directory) and
Postfix is told about the existence of this file by an appropriate line in
its main.cf file (in my case, that's /etc/postfix/main.cf). Unfortunately,
since this is OS X Server, that may not be correct for you (but
/etc/postfix is where the postfix stuff is by default on OS X client so
I'd guess it's there for OS X Server as well).

-- Larry Stone
   lstone19 at stonejongleux.com