UNIX System Administration Handbook - Evi Nemeth [331]
In general, SmartList is small and simple, ListProc is large and complex, and the others are in between. They differ in their philosophies of list maintenance, with some leaning toward sysadmins as administrators (ListProc) and others leaning toward users as maintainers (Majordomo, Mailman, SmartList, LISTSERV Lite). Majordomo and LISTSERV Lite support remote administration; the list maintainer does not even need to have a login on the machine where the list is located because all transactions take place through email. Most of the list packages allow information posted to the list to be assembled into digests, some automatically (ListProc, Mailman, and LISTSERV Lite) and some through manual configuration (SmartList and Majordomo).
Majordomo is our favorite list manager, but we hear that some sites are switching to Mailman. ListProc and LISTSERV Lite are proprietary: the first expensive, the other binary-only and crippled. We have not tried SmartList, but we like procmail, on which it depends.
We describe each of these packages briefly below. For more detail, see the documentation with each package or the O’Reilly book Managing Mailing Lists by Alan Schwartz and Paula Ferguson.
Majordomo
Majordomo is a Perl/C package available from www.greatcircle.com. It was originally written by Brent Chapman, was souped up by John Rouillard, and is now maintained by Chan Wilson. Development of Majordomo has ceased; Majordomo 2 is a total rewrite but is still in beta test, so we describe only the original Majordomo.
Majordomo runs as an unprivileged user, typically with username majordom and default group daemon. If your system supports long user names (> 8 characters), you can use majordomo as the login name. The user must be one that sendmail recognizes as “trusted” and so must be mentioned in your sendmail configuration, usually in a confTRUSTED_USERS declaration.
See page 608 for more information about trusted users.
Majordomo is configured through the majordomo.cf file, which consists of valid Perl commands that initialize variables, define the directories where things are or where they should be put, specify the lists to be supported, and configure the handling of bounced mail. A helper program, config-test, will test your configuration file for missing variables or bad syntax.
Majordomo requires special aliases to be installed in sendmail’s aliases file. The cleanest way to integrate these aliases is to create a separate alias file used just for Majordomo (recent versions of sendmail support multiple alias files). The file contains a set of aliases for Majordomo itself and a set for each mailing list that it manages. The distribution contains a sample aliases file, majordomo.aliases.
The most common user question about mailing lists is, “How do I unsubscribe?” For lists managed by Majordomo, the answer for listname@host is to send mail to the address majordomo@host with the words “unsubscribe listname” or “unsubscribe listname email-address” in the body of the message (not on the subject line).
With the first form, you need to send the unsubscribe message from the same host that you used when you subscribed to the list; in the second form, that host is part of the email address. See page 545 for hints on how to glean this information from the mail headers so that you can unsubscribe properly, even if you have forgotten which machine you used when you joined the list. Some mailing lists also accept mail to listname-request@host with just the word “unsubscribe” in the body.
Never, ever send an unsubscribe message to the list itself. If you do, your message announces to all the recipients of the list that you don’t know what you’re doing.
Mailman
Mailman, a fairly recent addition to the mailing list software fleet (version 1.0 released in July, 1999), is available from www.list.org or the GNU archives. It was originally written by John Viega and is currently being developed in