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Archived Mailing Lists (SDI 07 Part V)

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:
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
The first target will archive a copy of each email sent to it using the mhonarch archiver to a particular directory in our project subtree. The second one is the actual archived mailing list which consists of the archiver and the non-archived version of the same list, which contains all the human users.

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
Prepares the new mailing list to be activated. Postfix will run the delivery command with the user/group ID of the alias file they are defined in. Generating the archive as the apache user, ensures that it can be displayed later on by the webserver which runs under this user ID.

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>
After we send the first message to the ”swdev” mailing list, we can see the archive presented as /sdi07/lists/swdev/maillist.html on the local web server.