Managing mailing lists with Mlmmj

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Article from ADMIN 05/2011

By Florian Effenberger

Mlmmj is still a fairly unknown mailing list manager, but it's an interesting alternative to heavyweights such as Mailman.

When you need to manage mailing lists, Mailman is often the tool of choice. The program is not only mature and widespread, it also offers many functions in the framework of a convenient web interface. However, alternatives do exist. Mlmmj (Mailing List Management Made Joyful) is a less well-known representative of this category, but it's well worth looking into. In this article, I'll describe how the LibreOffice project uses Mlmmj.

Getting Started – Not Easy

During planning for the infrastructure of today's LibreOffice project, mailing lists played a central role in the community's main means of communication. The requirements were specific. Traditionally, the project has multiple mailing lists with the same names in different subdomains, for example, discuss@de.libreoffice.org and discuss@si.libreoffice.org ; the list is moderated by numerous volunteers around the globe who all use email.

And, it was precisely these requirements that Mailman was unable to fulfill – moderation is mainly web-based, protected by the same password for all moderators, and mailing lists of the same name will not be supported until version 3.0 is released.

After evaluating several systems, Mlmmj was finally chosen. Because of its similarity to Ezmlm, which was used by OpenOffice.org at the time, it was predestined to win because the users didn't need to change their habits. Whereas Ezmlm relies on Qmail to the exclusion of all others, Mlmmj is compatible with the most popular mail servers, including the one used in this scenario, Postfix.

Installation

Installing Mlmmj was a simple thing on our lab system, a current Ubuntu 10.04 LTS. A simple apt-get install mlmmj puts the package on the server. Mlmmj runs on its own user context for security reasons – if nothing else. On Ubuntu, the package doesn't

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