Installing and Configuring Mailman on NetBSD

In this tutorial, we will walk through the process of installing and configuring Mailman on NetBSD. Mailman is a popular open-source mailing list management software that allows you to create and manage email discussion lists.

Prerequisites

Before we proceed with the installation, make sure that your NetBSD system meets the following requirements:

• NetBSD version 7.0 or higher
• approximately 300 MB of disk space
• root access to the system

Installation

1. First, we need to install the necessary packages. Open a terminal and run the following command to update the package database:

pkgin update

2. Next, install the required packages:

pkgin install mailman apache24

This will install Mailman and Apache web server on your NetBSD system.

3. Once the installation is complete, we need to configure Mailman. Run the following command to create the mailman user:

groupadd mailman && useradd -g mailman -s /sbin/nologin -d /usr/pkg/mailman mailman

4. Now, we need to configure Apache web server to serve Mailman. Open the Apache configuration file at /usr/pkg/etc/httpd/httpd.conf using your preferred text editor.

Add the following lines to the end of the file:

ScriptAlias /mailman/ "/usr/pkg/mailman/cgi-bin/"
Alias /pipermail/ "/usr/pkg/mailman/archives/public/"

5. Save the changes and exit the text editor. Restart the Apache web server to apply the changes:

/usr/pkg/etc/rc.d/apache24 restart

Configuration

1. Now that Mailman and Apache are installed and configured, we need to create a Mailman list. To create a new list, run the following command:

newlist mailman

Replace "mailman" with the name of your list. Follow the prompts to set up your list.

2. You can access the web interface for Mailman by navigating to http://localhost/mailman/. Log in with the list administrator credentials that you set up in step 1.

3. You can manage your list by using the web interface or by sending commands to the list address. For example, to add a new member to the list, you can send an email to mailman-request@example.com with the subject line "subscribe" and the body of the email containing the email address of the new member.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we installed and configured Mailman on NetBSD. We created a Mailman list and demonstrated how to manage it using the web interface and email commands. With Mailman, you can easily create and manage email discussion lists for your organization or community.

If you want to self-host in an easy, hands free way, need an external IP address, or simply want your data in your own hands, give IPv6.rs a try!