mailman 2.1.9

When installing mailman 2.1.9 I had several problems.

Download, install itself is very easy, but:

The script that actually delivers the mails to mailman (/usr/local/mailman/mail/mailman) needs to run as the very group that you specified during running ./configure.

mailman is the default-group, but if your mailer runs as another group you need to specify it with ./configure --with-mail-gid=GROUP during install. In my case GROUP was root, although I think this should be avoided in general :)

If you dont set the proper group during configuration/install of mailman you will get the following error later and need to rerun configure and make install.

Group mismatch error.  Mailman expected the mail
wrapper script to be executed as group "mailman", but
the system's mail server executed the mail script as
group "root".  Try tweaking the mail server to run the
script as group "mailman", or re-run configure, 
providing the command line option `--with-mail-gid=root'.

I cant remember the exact error during make install but it had to do with japanese languate or japanese language-files. Dont know what the error meant, but I couldnt install mailman. I edited misc/paths.py in the source (which is recreated after every configure/make) and remove the japanese and korean-lines at the end of the file !! Then make install worked fine.

The installation-directory must exist prior to running make install !! Create it according to the install-instructions in admin/www/mailman-install.txt in the source-folder:

#cd /usr/local/mailman
#chgrp mailman .
#chmod a+rx,g+ws .

its very easy. Have the old version installed on your machine and simply install the new version. Upgrade of date is done automatically !! (of course only if the new version is installed into the same directory !!)

after install run /bin/perm_check

If you want to change host-url of an existing list, you will not find any corresponding entry/attribute in the webinterface or when running bin/config_list. You need to dig deeper and first change the default-url in /usr/local/mailman/Mailman/mm_cfg.py (DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN, DEFAULT_URL_HOST), which only affects new lists. But then run bin/withlist -l -r fix_url LISTNAME to apply this new url also on existing lists.

Be careful, cause maybe the value of DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST is also set in the list too. I’m not sure about that now ...
And also read the mailman-faq regarding fix_url, especially when you deal with VITUAL_HOSTS in relation with postfix ...
note that there is another script if you also need to change the urls in your archive-files.