[Mailman-Users] Virtual Domains for Mailing Lists in MailMan

[Mark Sapiro]

Gordon Smith wrote:
> 
> To explain my circumstance.  I am a visually impaired person, trying to
> get to grips with administrating a mail server under Apple Mac OS X
> 10.5.7 (Leopard) server.
> 
> I need to host mailing lists under virtual domains hosted on our server
> but can't see quite how this is accomplished.
> 
> Is there anywhere I can obtain this information as Apple's documentation
> on this subject seems poor from what I've seen.


Gordon,

Unfortunately, our documentation of virtual hosts with Mailman is
probably no better than Apple's. Also, I'm not sure how accessible it is
to a visually impaired person. Finally, most of us know nothing about
Apple's GUI for Mailman. We are familiar only with our own web interface
and configuration methods.

That said, virtual hosting within Mailman is pretty simple. Mailman
keeps a web host and an email host for each list, so list's can have
email addresses and or web addresses in different domains. There is one
possibly major restriction. List names must be globally unique within an
installation.

Within Mailman, there is very little configuration for virtual hosts.
There is a DEFAULT_URL_HOST and a corresponding DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST.
Beyond that, you add additional hosts with entries like

add_virtualhost('www.example.com', 'mail.example.com')

in mm_cfg.py for each host. The purpose of this is primarily so when you
go to a URL like http://www.example.com/mailman/create to create a list,
it gets created with the corresponding email host.

There is also a bit more configuration if Postfix is your MTA to make
Postfix integration work with virtual domains. This is described in
section 6.1 of the installation manual at
<http://www.list.org/mailman-install/index.html>.

The rest is in the MTA, and possibly the web server, although (assuming
Apache) if the Mailman specific Alias, ScriptAlias and Directory
settings are in a global section of the configuration, the web server
will probably work OK without change.

Most of the documentation we have is in the above referenced
installation manual and the FAQ at
<http://www.list.org/mailman-install/index.html>

Please don't hesitate to post any followup questions to
<mailman-users at python.org>.

-- 
Mark Sapiro <mark at msapiro.net>        The highway is for gamblers,
San Francisco Bay Area, California    better use your sense - B. Dylan