Mailing Lists Plus Ayitey Bulley bulley@ghana.com

Mailing Lists Plus

Ayitey Bulleybulley@ghana.com

Workshop Agenda

• Introduction to Mailing Lists• Majordomo Installation• Sendmail & Majordomo• Creating & Managing Lists• Mhonarc, Majorcool, other tools and

advanced topics

Introduction to Mailing Lists

• Really Basic Lists (the quick & dirty way)– addressbook– MTA (exim or sendmail) aliases

• Mailing List Management Software (MLM)– The Mailing List Software Inventory http://listes.

cru.fr/sympa/robots.html

Addressbook

• Advantages– Quick to implement.– Requires no interaction with any outside

agent (listmaster, MLM software, etc.).

• Disadvantages– It can quickly become a pain to keep updated.– Users replying to a message may end up

talking to many more people than they intended to.

– Control over list participation.– Does not scale well.

MTA (exim/sendmail) Aliases

• If a system administrator is willing to take on the task of maintaining list membership this can be done quickly using a sendmail aliases:

# Alias for distribution list, members specified here:

staff:wnj,mosher,sam,ecc,mckusick,sklower,olson,rwh@ernie

• A sysop may also allow aliases that point to lists that are managed by individual users:

# Alias for distribution list, members specified elsewhere:

mylist: :include:/usr/home/user/my-list

• While both of these are quick to set up, they require hand maintenance by the owner.

Mailing List Management Software (MLM)• When choosing an MLM you need to

remember that the software must allow at least three layers of list management:

– List Master– List Owners– List Members

List Master

• Trusted user with access to the central mailer software (exim, sendmail, etc.).

• Ability to create, delete and re-configure individual lists.

• Error handling and problem reporting.

List Owners

• Ability to manage user membership (subscribe/unsubscribe)

• Ability to configure list options and Information.

• Support of archives or digests • Access control for lists (open, closed,

moderated, etc.)

List Members

• Ability to manage personal membership (subscribe, unsubscribe)

• Access to information (lists, info, who, which)

• Access to the listowner (owner-listname@)

Supporting List Owners and End-users• This requires: listmaster@ & owner-

listname@• Good Documentation

– Joining a Mailing List at the UO – Managing a Majorodomo List

• Training – Managing a Majordomo List

• Communication – A list for list owners– Stock text for responding to common problems – Pointers to documents in every listmaster email

message (.signature file or message_footer)

Test Drive Exercise

•Create a mailing list using exim aliases file. •Join a majordomo list

Send mail to majordomo@afnog.org with subscribe afnog in the body of the message.

Majordomo Installation

• Before installing majordomo you will need:– root access– perl– sendmail or exim– gnu c compiler (gcc) or some other version of cc– complete paths to perl, sendmail or exim and gcc

• Installing majordomo consists of two main parts:– root tasks– tasks for majordomo user (majordom)

Installing Majordomo - root tasks

• Create a user and group to own majordomo.• Make changes to sendmail or exim

– add majordom to list of Trusted users– add an entry for the majordomo.aliases file

(optional)

• Create the majordomo.aliases file.– create empty files– set permissions on files– edit to add new list aliases to file– run exim_dbmbuild/newaliases– restart exim/sendmail

Installing Majordomo - root tasks (contd.)• Install the majordomo software.

– uncompress files in a temporary working directory.

– edit the Makefile defining• paths to Perl interpreter and C compiler.

• the majordomo home directory.

• location of the manual pages.

• user and group majordomo will run under.

• permissions for the various files and directories.

Installing Majordomo - root tasks (contd.)

• Create a majordomo.cf file and edit it.– copy the sample.cf file to majordomo.cf– edit the majordomo.cf file and set the ff. variables

• $whereami What machine am I on?

• $whoami Who do users send requests to me as?

• $whoami_owner Who is the owner of the above, for problems?

• $homedir Where can I find my extra .pl files?

• $listdir Where are the mailing lists?

• $log Where do I write my log?

• $sendmail_command Where the sendmail program resides.

• $mailer What program and args do I use to send mail to the lists?

• $bounce_mailer What program and args do I use to send administrative messages?

Installing Majordomo - root tasks (contd.)• Run make as needed

– make wrapper– make install– make install-wrapper– at this stage the Log file and the lists and

digests directories have not yet been created, though they have been named in the majordomo.cf file.

• Change login id to majordomo user

Installing Majordomo - majordom tasks• Finish the installation by completing the

ff. Tasks as the majordomo user.– create the Log file, and the lists & digests

directories.– run the config-test.– Test it further by creating a test list and

sending mail to majordomo.

Installing Majordomo - Exercise

• Install majordomo on your machines using the handouts

• create a mailing list on your workstations.

Sendmail & Majordomo

• Trusted UserTroot

Tdaemon

Tuucp

Tmajordom

• Using an aliases.majordomo file # location of alias file

O AliasFile=/etc/aliases,/home/majordom/aliases.majordomo

• newaliases equivalent to exim_dbmbuild

Managing Majordomo

• The most difficult part of mailing lists is day-to-day management. To lessen the task you need:– good documentation – good communication with your owners and

list members – and good tools as lists can quickly become

an enormous time sync.

Managing Majordomo

• It is very important to hand-off tasks to the lowest link in the mail chain at every opportunity. Hand-off could be as follows:root --> listmasterlistmaster --> listownerlistowner --> list members

• If you are the listmaster, you will also want a set of tools that allow you to deal with routine tasks such as list creation, deletion etc. as well as resolve problems with a minimum of effort.

Managing Majordomo - Exercise

• Install and setup the UO md-apps for managing list creation/deletion request.

• Use handouts to do this exercise.

MhonArc, Majorcool, other tools and advanced topics

• Mhonarc - a web archiving tool • Majorcool - another web archiving tool• Advanced Topics

– Virtual Lists• Limited use - requires root intervention

• You need mx records for each host

• Sendmail additions (digest related)

• Virtualusertables and maps

• Reconfigure scripts for multiple installations

• Sendmail configuration required