Girish Mahajan (Editor)

GNU Mailman

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Development status
  
Mature

Written in
  
Mostly Python, some C

GNU Mailman

Initial release
  
July 30, 1999; 17 years ago (1999-07-30)

Stable release
  
3.0.3 / March 29, 2016; 11 months ago (2016-03-29)

Preview release
  
3.0b4 / April 28, 2014; 2 years ago (2014-04-28)

Repository
  
gitlab.com/mailman/mailman

GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists. Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Barry Warsaw. Mailman is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License.

Contents

History

A very early version of Mailman was written by John Viega while a graduate student, who then lost his copy of the source in a hard drive crash sometime around 1998. Ken Manheimer at CNRI, who was looking for a replacement for Majordomo, then took over development. When Manheimer left CNRI, Barry Warsaw took over. Mailman 3—the first major new version in over a decade—was released in April 2015.

Features

Mailman runs on Linux and most Unix-like systems. Since Mailman 3.0 it has required python-3.4 or newer. It works with Unix-style mail servers such as Postfix, Sendmail and qmail. Features include:

  • A customizable home page for each maillist.
  • Web interfaces for list administration, archiving of messages, spam filtering, etc. Separate interfaces are available for users (for self-administration), moderators (to accept/reject list posts), and administrators.
  • Support for multiple administrators and moderators for each list.
  • Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
  • Integrated bounce detection and automatic handling of bouncing addresses.
  • Integrated spam filters
  • Majordomo-style email based commands.
  • Support for virtual domains.
  • List archiving. The default archiver provided with Mailman 2 is Pipermail, although other archivers can be used instead. The archiver for Mailman 3 is HyperKitty.

    • References

    GNU Mailman Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA