Getting started with GNU Mailman

Copyright (C) 2008-2016 by the Free Software Foundation, Inc.

Contact Us

Contributions of code, problem reports, and feature requests are welcome. Please submit bug reports on the Mailman bug tracker at https://gitlab.com/mailman/mailman/issues (you need to have a login on Gitlab to do so). You can also send email to the mailman-developers@python.org mailing list, or ask on IRC channel #mailman on Freenode.

Requirements

For the Core, Python 3.4 or newer is required. It can either be the default ‘python3’ on your $PATH or it can be accessible via the python3.4 binary. If your operating system does not include Python, see http://www.python.org for information about downloading installers (where available) and installing it from source (when necessary or preferred). Python 2 is not supported.

You may need some additional dependencies, which are either available from your OS vendor, or can be downloaded automatically from the Python Cheeseshop.

Documentation

The documentation for Mailman 3 is distributed throughout the sources. The core documentation (such as this file) is found in the src/mailman/docs directory, but much of the documentation is in module-specific places. A prebuilt HTML version of Mailman 3 documentation is available at pythonhosted.org, as is Postorius documentation. HyperKitty documentation is available at ReadTheDocs.

The Development Setup Guide is a recent step-by-step explanation of how to set up a complete Mailman 3 system including the Mailman 3 core and basic client API, Postorius, and HyperKitty.

Testing Mailman 3

To run the Mailman test suite, just use the tox command:

$ tox

tox creates a virtual environment (virtualenv) for you, installs all the dependencies into that virtualenv, and runs the test suite from that virtualenv. By default it does not use the –system-site-packages so it downloads everything from the Cheeseshop.

You do have access to the virtualenv, and you can use this to run individual tests, e.g.:

$ .tox/py34/bin/python -m nose2 -vv -P user

Use .tox/py34/bin/python -m nose2 –help for more options.

If you want to run the full test suite against the PostgreSQL database, set the database up as described in Setting up your database, then create a postgres.cfg file any where you want. This postgres.cfg file will contain the [database] section for PostgreSQL, e.g.:

[database]
class: mailman.database.postgresql.PostgreSQLDatabase
url: postgres://myuser:mypassword@mypghost/mailman

Then run the test suite like so:

$ MAILMAN_EXTRA_TESTING_CFG=/path/to/postgres.cfg tox -e pg

If you want to run an individual test against PostgreSQL, you would do it like so:

$ MAILMAN_EXTRA_TESTING_CFG=/path/to/postgres.cfg .tox/pg/bin/python -m nose2 -vv -P user

Building for development

To build Mailman for development purposes, you can create a virtual environment outside of tox. You need to have the virtualenv program installed, or you can use Python 3’s built-in pyvenv command.

First, create a virtual environment (venv). The directory you install the venv into is up to you, but for purposes of this document, we’ll install it into /tmp/mm3:

% pyvenv /tmp/mm3

Now, activate the virtual environment and set it up for development:

% source /tmp/mm3/bin/activate
% python setup.py develop

Sit back and have some Kombucha while you wait for everything to download and install.

Build the online docs by running:

% python setup.py build_sphinx

If setup.py fails to recognize the build_sphinx command, then just install Sphinx in your virtualenv:

% pip install sphinx

This will automatically add the build_sphinx command to setup.py, so just re-run the command.

Then visit:

build/sphinx/html/index.html

in your browser to start reading the documentation. Or you can just read the doctests by looking in all the ‘doc’ directories under the ‘mailman’ package. Doctests are documentation first, so they should give you a pretty good idea how various components of Mailman 3 work.

Once everything is downloaded and installed, you can initialize Mailman and get a display of the basic configuration settings by running:

$ mailman info -v

Running Mailman 3

What, you actually want to run Mailman 3? Oh well, if you insist. You will need to set up a configuration file to override the defaults and set things up for your environment. Mailman is configured using an “ini”-style configuration system.

src/mailman/config/schema.cfg defines the ini-file schema and contains documentation for every section and configuration variable. Sections that end in .template or .master are templates that must be overridden in actual configuration files. There is a default configuration file that defines these basic overrides in src/mailman/config/mailman.cfg. Your own configuration file will override those.

By default, all runtime files are put under a var directory in the current working directory.

Mailman searches for its configuration file using the following search path. The first existing file found wins.

  • -C config command line option
  • $MAILMAN_CONFIG_FILE environment variable
  • ./mailman.cfg
  • ~/.mailman.cfg
  • /etc/mailman.cfg
  • argv[0]/../../etc/mailman.cfg

Run the mailman info command to see which configuration file Mailman will use, and where it will put its database file. The first time you run this, Mailman will also create any necessary run-time directories and log files.

Try mailman --help for more details. You can use the commands mailman start to start the runner subprocess daemons, and of course mailman stop to stop them.

Postorius, a web UI for administration and subscriber settings, is being developed as a separate, Django-based project. For now, the most flexible means of configuration is via the command line and REST API.

Mailman Web UI

The Mailman 3 web UI, called Postorius, interfaces to core Mailman engine via the REST client API. It is expected that this architecture will make it possible for users with other needs to adapt the web UI, or even replace it entirely, with a reasonable amount of effort. However, as a core feature of Mailman, the web UI will emphasize usability over modularity at first, so most users should use the web UI described here.

The Archiver

In Mailman 3, the archivers are decoupled from the core engine. Instead, Mailman 3 provides a simple, standard interface for third-party archiving tools and services. For this reason, Mailman 3 defines a formal interface to insert messages into any of a number of configured archivers, using whatever protocol is appropriate for that archiver. Summary, search, and retrieval of archived posts are handled by a separate application.

A new archive UI called Hyperkitty, based on the notmuch mail indexer and Django, was prototyped at the PyCon 2012 sprint by Toshio Kuratomi. The Hyperkitty archiver is very loosely coupled to Mailman 3 core. In fact, any email application that speaks LMTP or SMTP will be able to use Hyperkitty.