[Mailman-Users] Hosted mail vs Mailman

[Grant Taylor]

On 03/19/09 11:08, michael at wa7skg.com wrote:
> Please forgive my very basic noob question.  I just want to be sure I 
> understand this correctly.

That's what lists like this one are for.

> I have an email address with an email provider on a completely 
> separate host and system.

Ok...

> I want to use Mailman with this address.  Does Mailman, in essence, 
> act as a email client, receiving an email just like any other client 
> (Thunderbird, Mutt, etc.) would, act appropriately on it and send out 
> the response to a generated list?

No Mailman its self is not an email (POP3) client.

> Therefore, I could have Mailman run on a separate web host or 
> whatever, and it would use the email address just fine?

If you add something like fetchmail to the mix, yes you can do what you 
are wanting to do.

Fetchmail will act as the "email client" and then pass the messages that 
it downloads (POP3) in to Mailman for processing.

> With my email service, I can create email boxes and that is about it. 
>  I can't do anything else on the server side.

Ok.  I don't see this being a problem.

You may end up having fetchmail pull from different mail boxes for 
different Mailman mailing lists.

Considering this you may want to add another piece to the puzzle, namely 
Procmail.  Procmail will allow you to take the email retrieved via 
fetchmail and act on it differently depending on what is in the message 
(To: address).

Using fetchmail -> procmail -> Mailman you could easily have one set of 
configs on your server that will function on multiple mailboxes / 
Mailman mailing lists.

> With my webhosting service, I can do pretty much anything web 
> accessed, but I cannot run an email server.

*nod*

> Thanks for your patience with the new guy.

n/p



Grant. . . .