Re: mailing lists with Owl

On Mon, Jan 18, 2010 at 12:38:02AM +0300, [email protected] wrote:
> what soft would you recommend as a mailing list engine to deploy under Owl?

I am not aware of a mailing list engine I would fully recommend, but of
those I've seen ezmlm-idx is a good choice, in my opinion.  The other
popular alternative is Mailman, but I dislike that one for a variety of
reasons.

http://www.ezmlm.org

ezmlm-idx was designed to work along with qmail, which is a drawback
these days.  Yet installing netqmail would probably be the easiest way
to get ezmlm-idx working:

http://www.qmail.org/netqmail/

You could install these, say, to /opt/ezmlm-idx/VERSION and
/opt/netqmail/VERSION (substituting the current version numbers for
VERSION), then create "current" symlinks under /opt/ezmlm-idx and
/opt/netqmail, and maybe create some symlinks under /usr/local/bin.
This is the approach we're using for installs of locally-built software.

If you can dedicate more time to this, you could want to try getting
ezmlm-idx to work with Postfix.  Apparently, some people got it working:

http://www.google.com/search?q=ezmlm-idx+postfix
http://bsd.dischaos.com/2008/05/07/ezmlm-idx-postfix-quick-and-dirty-howto/
http://www.postfix.org/qmqpd.8.html

The Postfix qmqpd(8) man page refers to:

"README FILES
       QMQP_README, Postfix ezmlm-idx howto."

but the file itself merely says:

"Postfix qmail and ezmlm support

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This document will be made available via http://www.postfix.org/."

The URL for it is:

http://www.postfix.org/QMQP_README.html

(I am posting it in case real content appears there by the time someone
finds this message in the list archives.)

If you get it working, please post a follow-up in here.  The Openwall
wiki would be a good place for a how-to article.

> May be someone has packages for it?  Thanks!

I don't.  I've been installing ezmlm-idx and (net)qmail under /opt.

Besides the "dependency" on qmail, another drawback of the usual
ezmlm-idx with qmail setup is that it will produce unnecessarily too
many potentially unsolicited bounce and auto-reply messages.  While the
mailing list manager has to verify a new subscriber's address before
actually subscribing the address, it could avoid producing auto-replies
in many/most/all other cases.  I was dealing with this to a limited
extent with some custom scripting (detecting and dropping spam messages
in an aggressive manner before letting them through to ezmlm-idx's
programs).  Similarly, qmail itself would by default accept and then
bounce messages for non-existent recipient addresses (in the configured
domains).  I was dealing with this with some custom code or with
chkuser, but maybe netqmail includes an equivalent of chkuser by now,
which would make a proper setup simpler.  There's a relevant wiki page:

http://openwall.info/wiki/internal/email/qmail

but like I mentioned getting ezmlm-idx to work with Postfix would be
much better.  Maybe you'd even package it for Owl add-ons. ;-)

Alexander