GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists. Mailman is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License. Ken Manheimer at Corporation for National Research Initiatives (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.

thumb|right|320px|Web administration interface for GNU Mailman 2.1

Features

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

  • A customizable publicly-accessible Web page for each mailing list.
  • Web application 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.

See also

  • List of mailing list software
  • Electronic mailing list

References

Further reading

Reviews

  • Mailing List Management Made Easy

Other resources

  • List Administrator's Guide
  • "Mailman – An Extensible Mailing List Manager Using Python"; Ken Manheimer, Barry Warsaw, John Viega; presented at the 7th International Python Conference, Nov 10–13, 1998
  • "Mailman: The GNU Mailing List Manager"; John Viega, Barry Warsaw, Ken Manheimer; presented at the 12th Usenix Systems Administration Conference (LISA '98), Dec 9, 1998
  • GNU Mailman chapter in The Architecture of Open Source Applications Volume 2
  • Barry Warsaw presentation on Mailman 3 at PyCon US 2012
  • Mailman Documentation
  • Mailman support mailing lists