| By
Tom McAdam <tomc@future-i.com> |
| Status: Draft Version |
We use ezmlm for mailing lists, mainly because it integrates well with qmail and is highly configurable.
I will refer to $LIST_HOME as the root directory of the list.
It is recommended that you set up a Unix group for list administrators, with the convention of list-listname. Lists are stored under /usr/local/ezmlm/lists/ To create a list, firstly decide on the email address for it, such as 300list@future-i.com.
ezmlm-make options /usr/local/ezmlm/lists/listname dot-qmail user host
user is the username portion of the email address, and it obviously follows that host is the domain. Don't ask me why you can't just pass it "user@host", I haven't got a clue. dotqmail is the base .qmail file to install the aliases under. For example, if the .qmails for a domain are in ~alias, then this would be /var/qmail/alias/.qmail-fi-300list. It will make the necessary other aliases, such as list-subscribe.
For a list of options, see man ezmlm. Common ones are:
An important issue is the permissions on the directory tree. This is dependant on who qmail runs as to deliver the mail. If the .qmail file for the list resides in your home directory, then you must have write access to the tree - if it's in the ~alias directory, then alias must have write access to the tree. Update the permissions as follows:
chmod -R g+rwX /usr/local/ezmlm/lists/listname/
chown -R alias:list-listname /usr/local/ezmlm/lists/listname/
The $LIST_HOME/owner file is a standard .qmail file - amend it to forward mail to the appropriate person. This .qmail is invoked when mail is sent to listname-owner. Again, bear in mind permissions - if the mail is being delivered as alias then it won't have write access to your Maildir or mbox, so you'll normally want to specify a username here rather than a directory.
The following commands are available for list management:
| Command | Details |
|---|---|
| ezmlm-list $LIST_DIR | List all users subscribed to a list |
| ezmlm-(un)sub $LIST_DIR email | (un)subscribe a user to the mailing list |
put some more here! In the meantime do an ezmlm-tab from the command line to see the available commands :-)
Subscribe yourself to the list and send it a test message, while tailing /var/log/qmail/qmail-send/current to see what qmail's up to. The most common problem is permissions on the list directory.
Although this probably isn't the correct term for this..... change! There are occasions when a certain subset of users are given permission to do something on the list. For example, if the list is moderated, a list of moderators is required. ezmlm is nice in its handling of these users, insofaras they're just another list, and can be managed using the ezmlm-sub etc. commands. The lists are:
The messages sent by ezmlm are stored in $LIST_HOME/text/