Internal Mailing Lists with GNU Mailman

We’ve been trying to figure out other ways to reduce the maintenance effort required with email. On top of all the other stuff we have related to projects in email, we also have discussions that happen between engineers in the various engineering disciplines we practice. They use GroupWise distribution lists for this, but since there is no easy way to archive all the mail from a distribution list, everybody on the list tends to keep everything they ever get emailed to them, and it just adds up to a lot of unnecessary email. The other hassle with that, is that some person has to maintain the mailing list membership.

An alternative to this is to use a mailing list manager with automatic web archiving, so that users can self-subscribe to a list, and when they get messages from the list, they can delete them after reading them, because the mailing list manager will automatically archive all the messages.

I’ve been working with GNU Mailman for this, on a little Ubuntu Server virtual machine. Ubuntu’s wiki has a simple-to-follow procedure on how to set it up using exim4 or postfix as your MTA. I built the virtual machine using the Ubuntu server install CD, apt-get installed Mailman and Postfix, followed the wiki directions, and voila, I had a nice mailing list server. Then, I just added a pointer in my GroupWise route.cfg in the Internet Agent, and it all worked.

I created a few preliminary groups, and everything seems to work, so now I just have to write up some simple user docos, and create a backup script for the list archives, and we’re off to the races. I love open source software.