Mailman - The GNU Mailing List Management System

This is GNU Mailman, a mailing list management system distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3 or later.

Mailman is written in Python, a free object-oriented programming language. Python is available for all platforms that Mailman is supported on, which includes GNU/Linux and most other Unix-like operating systems (e.g. Solaris, *BSD, MacOSX, etc.). Mailman is not supported on Windows, although web and mail clients on any platform should be able to interact with Mailman just fine.

GNU Mailman 3 consists of a suite of programs that work together:

  • Mailman Core; the core delivery engine. This is where you are right now.

  • Postorius; the web user interface for list members and administrators.

  • HyperKitty; the web-based archiver

  • Mailman client; the official Python bindings for talking to the Core’s REST administrative API.

Only the Core is required. You can write or integrate your own web user interface or archiver that speaks to the Core over its REST API. The REST API is a pure HTTP-based API so you don’t have to use Python, or even our official bindings. And you can deploy whatever components you want using whatever mechanisms you want.

But we really like Postorius and HyperKitty and hope you will too!

Spelling

The name of this software is spelled Mailman with a leading capital M but with a lower case second m. Any other spelling is incorrect. Its full name is GNU Mailman but is often referred colloquially as Mailman.

History

Mailman was originally developed by John Viega in the mid-1990s. Subsequent development (through version 1.0b3) was by Ken Manheimer. Further work towards the 1.0 final release was a group effort, with the core contributors being: Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer, Scott Cotton, Harald Meland, and John Viega. Since version 1.0 the project has been led by Barry Warsaw with contributions from many; see the ACKNOWLEDGMENTS file for details. Jeremy Hylton helped considerably with the Pipermail code in Mailman 2.0. Mailman 2.1 is primarily maintained by Mark Sapiro, with previous help by Tokio Kikuchi (RIP). Mark also contributes to Mailman 3. Barry Warsaw recently (2019) retired as the lead developer on Mailman 3. Abhilash Raj is now the lead developer and also maintains the CI infrastructure. Aurélien Bompard and Florian Fuchs lead development of Postorius and HyperKitty.

Project details

(GNU Mailman 2.1 is still maintained on Launchpad.)

There are two mailing lists you can use to contact the Mailman 3 developers. The general development mailing list:

and the Mailman 3 users list:

For now, please leave the older mailman-users mailing list for Mailman 2.