Mailman and virtual domains

I used to run mailman on three domains. Its kind of a pain to set up intially, but it should work.

You can't do this via RPM, but you can do it with the source file. Just specifiy your options while running ./configure.. there are help files to show the options.

Here's Mine (I created a script to run it with these options)

./configure –prefix=/home/mailman --with-username=dflists --with-groupname=darkforest --with-mailhost=darkforestmud.net --with-urlhost=darkforestmud.net --with-cgi-gid=darkforest --with-mail-gid=postdrop

Then I continue, setting everything up for this mailman. Then I run it again, such as:

./configure --prefix=/home/mailman2 --with-username=mailman2 --with-groupname=mailman2 --with-mailhost=intermountaingrove.org --with-urlhost=intermountaingrove.org --with-cgi-gid=apache --with-mail-gid=apache

It probably depends on exactly what you want but I installed mailman on my RedHat 9 from the RPM and have it happily working on two domains. To tell you the truth, I didn't really understand what all the virtual domain talk was about so I went ahead blindly anyway :)

The RPM put this in my httpd.conf.

ScriptAlias /mailman/ /var/mailman/cgi-bin/

Alias /pipermail/ /var/mailman/archives/public/

That made the web interface accessible as /mailman from any of my virtual domains. Mailman recognises the domain you are accessing it from so if you create a new list from http://mydomain1.com/mailman/create, then it knows that this list is for mydomain1.com and that is reflected in the messages etc.

Its been a while but here's what I remember:

The list name must be unique across all domains, ie you can't directly (but see below) have mylist@mydomain1.com and mylist@mydomain2.com. You need to have something like mylist1@mydomain1.com and mylist2@mydomain2.com. If that works then you don't need to do anything else.

I wanted the same list name, eg MyList, (but different actual lists) under different domains so I named them something like mylist1 and mylist2 and then set some entries in SendMail's virtusertable to forward mylist@mydomain1.com to mylist1@mydomain1.com and mylist@mydomain2.com to mylist2@mydomain2.com. Then, for each list, I went to the mailman Privacy options / Recipient filters and set the Alias name to mylist@mydomain1.com or mylist@mydomain2.com so they would accept mail sent to those addresses.

The only thing not transparent to the users was the welcome message. I added some extra text at the top to say "You can also send to this list at mylist@mydomain1.com".

Well … I don't know if that helps :)

Good luck

Ross

I did what Ross suggested first. I wasn't really happy with it but the reason now escapes me. I am sure there must've been some cross over between the domains, or something to that affect. The only solution that I found from googling my problem is to create different installations of mailman.

Trying to think back, I believe mailman's RPM only sets up one mailman.conf file. As most of my lists are email-oriented, mailman as a defaultemailhost that will send email from one host--mailman@myhost.com. I much prefer having mailman send email as either mailman@myhost.com or lists@myhost2.com and keep my installations of the mailman daemon seperate, in its handling of email commands to the daemon itself.

You could do some trickery with address rewriting or virtual domains so that

listname-(post|subscribe|…)@domain

maps to

listname-domain-(post|subscribe|…)@lists.otherdomain.com.

Then, to create a list, you need to actually make the list "listname-domain" on your mail server and give that list the alias "listname@domain".

Of course, if you don't mind the constraint that listnames have to be unique across virtual domains, then none of what I said is needed at all.

Looks like I've got something up and running quite nicely with Apache2, Mailman, and Postfix. Everything works through the web interface and is automatically updated in Postfix. If anybody is interested, I'd be happy to sit down and write up what I've done.

(I also managed to work in POP/IMAP access with Dovecot and user/domain info storage with PostgreSQL)