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Content about GNU

June 15, 2000
Building a High-Volume Newsletter Server

We've come a long way from the early days of the Internet, when many "mailing lists" were simply multiuser aliases maintained by the postmaster of a UNIX server. In those days, it was common for such "list" aliases to have a "-L" suffix, so sys admins and users could easily tell the difference between user accounts and multiuser lists. Subscription was a matter of emailing the sys admin and asking to be added to the alias. All mail sent to the list alias was simply resent, or "exploded," to all the users on the alias.

June 15, 2000
Mailman Made Easy

Mailman is the free software contender to mail-server products such as Lyris, which feature GUI-driven administration, user-level access to preferences, and built-in archives, digests, and the like. Based on the popular Python programming language, Mailman is intended to be used on UNIX systems, and can be installed alongside Majordomo on the same server, without conflicts. It has a few notable weaknesses, like that it can't easily be made aware of virtual hosts (although with a good dose of Apache configuration and some virtusertable tweaks it could probably be made to work.) I won't discuss that in this article, however, so let's not dawdle.