Downloading Mailman

Mailman currently runs only on Unix-y systems, such as Linux, Solaris, *BSD, etc. It should work on MacOSX but not earlier versions of MacOS. It probably does not work on Windows, although it's possible you could get it running on a Cygwin system (please let the developer community know if you have success with this!)

Before you can run Mailman, you need to make sure that Python is installed. Mailman requires at least Python 1.5.2 and is known to work with Python 1.6 and Python 2.0. Most Linux systems come with Python pre-installed, so you just need to make sure you're running an up-to-date version. You can do this by executing the following at your shell's command line:

% python
Python 2.0 (#128, Oct 18 2000, 04:48:44) 
[GCC egcs-2.91.66 19990314/Linux (egcs-1.1.2 release)] on linux2
Type "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> ^D

You will also need an SMTP server (a.k.a. mail transport agent or MTA) for mail delivery and reception. Sendmail is the oldest and most widely-used MTA, and comes pre-installed on most Unix systems, however it is not the recommended MTA to use with Mailman. It works, but you may get better results from one of the newer MTAs. Good results are reported on the Mailman mailing lists from people using Postfix, Exim, and Qmail. Most Mailman development is done with Postfix.

You will need a web server. Apache is certainly the most popular, is available for all Unix systems, and works great with Mailman.

To install Mailman from the sources, you will also need an ANSI C compiler. The GNU C compiler gcc 2.8.1 or later is known to work well.

Downloading

Version (2.0.5, released on May 4 2001) is the current GNU release. It is available from the following mirror sites:

If you're using a command line FTP client, be sure to set the mode to binary. Once you've downloaded the source tarball, you can unpack it with the following commands:

% cd /usr/local/src
% tar zxf mailman.tar.gz

Mailman's tarball unpacks into a directory called mailman-xyz where xyz is the version number. Note also that some versions of tar don't accept the z option. In that case, you'll need to use the gunzip program like so:

% gunzip -c mailman.tar.gz | tar xf -