Mailman Documentation

On-line documentation for Mailman 2.1 is still under construction, but is organized among the following audiences:
  • Users -- anybody who is a member of a mailing list managed by Mailman. This documentation explains how you can subscribe and unsubscribe from mailing lists, how to change your personal options, and how to interact with other parts of the Mailman system.

  • List Managers -- anybody who is a list administrator or moderator for a mailing list. This documentation goes into all the gory details about how to set up your lists, what the various options mean and control, and how to manage the membership of your mailing list.

  • Site Administrators -- anybody who is installing and setting up a Mailman site. This documentation contains all the information about installing Mailman, integrating it with your mail and web servers, setting list defaults, configuring virtual domains, and enabling various options for your list administrators. This documentation also gives some hints on how to tune Mailman for optimal performance.

  • Translators (wiki) -- anybody who is contributing to internationalization support for Mailman. This describes contact addresses for the current language champions and tells you what you need to do if you want to contribute a new language translation to the project (more are always welcome!).

Also see the wiki page at http://wiki.list.org/DOC/Home for possibly more recent/complete versions of the above.

Other Resources

The University of Washington has some very nice documentation on their installation of Mailman. It may be specific to UW's set up at times, but you might find it useful as a general help guide too.

The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) is available to answer the most common questions. See also the community driven Mailman FAQ. Feel free to add or correct entries in the FAQ -- this is your resource for helping your colleagues.

For issues not covered in the FAQ or documentation pages above, please check the archives of the Mailman-Users mailing list. If your question is not covered in the documentation, FAQ, or list archives, then you can send your questions to the mailman-users list. We suggest you subscribe to the list first - then submit your question - so that your question will be distributed quickly to the list subscribers and replies also will be distributed quickly back to you.

Nigel Metheringham has posted a HOWTO on using Exim and Mailman together. If you're using the Exim mailer you should check this out.

The Mailman source distribution itself contains many README files for discussion of issues specific to operating system, mail transport agent, or web server.