In the previous episode of our series on startup software development infrastructure, we have setup the basic email deliver system. The next step is to provide a solution for archived mailing lists.
Mailing lists have long been a backbone of the Internet community and there are mature solutions for managing very large-scale mailing lists. The classics are Listserv and Majordomo where users can manage their own subscriptions by sending emails with embedded commands and more recently Mailman has become very popular because of its web interface for managing mailing list settings for both users and administrators. Mailman even has a built-in web-based email archive.
Since we are targeting our solution for very small teams, we can get away with an even simpler approach. We expect our teams to only have a handful of members and where people joining and leaving are very rare events. In this case, we can simply use the mail alias functionality built into the email server. To maintain the web-based archive, we use MHonArc an email to html converter as a member on each of the lists.
Assuming our main software team maling list will simply be called swdev, we create the following three alias targets in a file /data/sdi07/lists/list-aliases:
Creating both the regular and noarc version of each list is not required but it can be convenient for sending social and administrative email, which may not need to be archived.
To start delivery, we need to add our new alias file to the alias configuration in /etc/postfix/main.cfg:
And in order to make the mailing list archive visible on the website, we need to add the following section to the apache configuration file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
Mailing lists have long been a backbone of the Internet community and there are mature solutions for managing very large-scale mailing lists. The classics are Listserv and Majordomo where users can manage their own subscriptions by sending emails with embedded commands and more recently Mailman has become very popular because of its web interface for managing mailing list settings for both users and administrators. Mailman even has a built-in web-based email archive.
Since we are targeting our solution for very small teams, we can get away with an even simpler approach. We expect our teams to only have a handful of members and where people joining and leaving are very rare events. In this case, we can simply use the mail alias functionality built into the email server. To maintain the web-based archive, we use MHonArc an email to html converter as a member on each of the lists.
Assuming our main software team maling list will simply be called swdev, we create the following three alias targets in a file /data/sdi07/lists/list-aliases:
swdev-archive: "|/usr/bin/mhonarc -add -outdir /data/sdi07/lists/swdev/ -title ’swdev mailing list archive’"
swdev : swdev-noarc, swdev-archive
swdev-noarc : user1, user2, user3
Creating both the regular and noarc version of each list is not required but it can be convenient for sending social and administrative email, which may not need to be archived.
mkdir /data/sdi07/lists/swdev
chown -R apache:apache /data/sdi07/
postalias /data/sdi07/list-aliases
To start delivery, we need to add our new alias file to the alias configuration in /etc/postfix/main.cfg:
alias_map = hash:/etc/aliases, hash:/var/proj/milinglists/list-aliases
And in order to make the mailing list archive visible on the website, we need to add the following section to the apache configuration file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf:
Alias /sdi07/lists/swdev "/data/sdi07/lists/swdev"
<Directory "/data/sdi07/lists/swdev">
AllowOverride None
Options -Indexes
</Directory>