I recently needed to set up a mailing list for a group of friends (my bike club). I had become tired of mail bounces and failures because we were all relying on an out of date list of addresses originally cobbled together by one member. That list of addresses was routinely used in “reply all” messages to others about forthcoming social events. An obvious improvement would be a mail list – ideally one which members could manage themselves. I originally looked at using a quick and dirty system using a mail forwarding mechanism which would simply explode mail sent to one address to the complete list of aliases (I can be lazy). However I discovered that neither my mail/web provider, nor my ISP really offered this facility in quite the way I wanted it. So, an obvious way forward would be do it myself using a slug.
I’ve used mailman in the past and knew it offered everything I wanted (including a web interface for membership management and access to archived messages), but I don’t (or rather didn’t) run a mail server on my home network. So that had to be fixed first. The necessary ingredients for the list management were: mailman itself; an MTA (I chose postfix because I know it, like it and find the default debian exim unnecessarily complicated); and a webserver (I was already running lighttpd on both slugs because it performs better than apache on low memory machines). I also wanted to use SSL encryption on the webserver to preserve password integrity (but not to authenticate the webserver itself).
There were a number of steps required to get this all working to my satisfaction. These were:
Step 1 – upstream SMTP authentication using TLS with postfix;
Step 2 – getting a mailman listserver running with postfix;
Step 3 – configuring lighttpd with SSL for mailman;
Step 4 – putting it all together and letting the world in.
It all worked, but the main drawback turned out to be the performance of the slug when running mailman. The combination of SSL encryption and mailman python scripts is too big a hit for a device with only 32 Mb of RAM. It would be perfectly feasible to run mailman on the slug if we limited ourselves to management by email alone (i.e. ignore the web management interface). But doing this would severely limit its functionality and in such case we might as well look at alternative list managers such as Majordomo or Listproc. In the end, the attractiveness of mailman’s web interface meant that I moved it all off the slug and onto a more powerful platform (also running debian). Nevertheless, the documentation here may be of use to anyone considering a mailman install with postfix and lighttpd on any linux distro. The notes on SSL usage at step 3 can, of course, also be applied (with suitable modification) to apache or any other webserver supporting SSL certificates.
