[Mailman-Users] Operating mailman across a mail gateway for inboundmail.

[Mark Sapiro]

Oscar Hodgson wrote:
>
>I'm considering Mailman as an alternative.  High number of groups, small  
>number of users, used for internal groups, no interest / need for public  
>discussion groups.  This is about managing our business, not communicating  
>with the world (although some of our users forward internal mail to  
>external SMTP servers ...).
>
>Mailman docs seem to be oriented towards a direct connection to the  
>internet for external mail.


Mailman is typically installed on a machine with an MTA and a web
server. The MTA handles inbound and outbound mail possibly receiving
and/or sending via other relays. It is difficult to administer Mailman
lists without the web interface.


>We've got a single opening in the firewall for SMTP (inbound and  
>outbound), and that's fine by me.  Having Mailman running on the mail  
>server (sendmail) is not a viable option ... but having all mail that  
>addressed to lists delivered to mboxes on the gateway that are  
>periodically (10 mins?) retrieved via POP and fed into Mailman would be a  
>viable option (but I'm open to suggestions).


This can be done via something like fetchmail on the Mailman server, or
you could have an MTA installed on the Mailman server and arrange for
the mail server to relay list mail to the Mailman server via SMTP. The
latter approach is simplest if you have a dedicated subdomain for
Mailman lists. Then you don't have to touch the mail server when
creating or deleting Mailman lists.


>There's no split DNS here,  
>the MX for Mailman would presumably be the external MX host.  When Mailman  
>needs to distribute externally, outbound mail would go across the external  
>gateway.


This part is doable by telling Mailman to use the mail server directly
for outgoing SMTP or possibly by relaying via a local MTA. It is not
clear to me how internal mail would be routed from the Mailman server
to the recipients, so I don't know which might be a more suitable
solution.

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