Lists.wikimedia.org

The new Mailman setup lives on lily, and uses the standard Ubuntu package mailman. The mailing list state is under /var/lib/mailman/, the global configuration is in /etc/mailman/.

The mail server used is Exim, the web server used is lighttpd.

Mailman setup

Mailman has fairly reasonable default values, and doesn't need a lot of changes from the defaults. The following settings were modified in /etc/mailman/mm_cfg.py:

# If you change these, you have to configure your http server
# accordingly (Alias and ScriptAlias directives in most httpds)
DEFAULT_URL_PATTERN = 'http://%s/mailman/'
PRIVATE_ARCHIVE_URL = '/mailman/private'

# Default domain for email addresses of newly created MLs
DEFAULT_EMAIL_HOST = 'lists.wikimedia.org'
# Default host for web interface of newly created MLs
DEFAULT_URL_HOST   = 'lists.wikimedia.org'

Exim recognizes which lists exist under @lists.wikimedia.org, so aliases are only needed in other domains:

# Uncomment this if you configured your MTA such that it
# automatically recognizes newly created lists.
# (see /usr/share/doc/mailman/README.{EXIM,...})
# MTA=None   # Misnomer, suppresses alias output on newlist
MTA=None

# Set Reply-To to the list by default
DEFAULT_REPLY_GOES_TO_LIST = 0

Mail server setup

For content scanning, temporary mbox files are written to /var/spool/exim4/scan, and deleted after scanning. To improve performance somewhat, this directory is mounted as a tmpfs filesystem, using the following line in /etc/fstab:

tmpfs   /var/spool/exim4/scan   tmpfs   defaults        0       0

Web server setup

To get Mailman running with lighttpd, a couple of small changes had to be made to the default configuration file. mod_cgi and mod_redirect need to be loaded:

server.modules              = (
           "mod_access",
           "mod_alias",
           "mod_accesslog",
           "mod_redirect",
           "mod_cgi",
)

To make path /mailman/ invoke the correct CGI scripts, use:

# Mailman
alias.url = (
       "/mailman/"     => "/usr/lib/cgi-bin/mailman/",
       "/pipermail/"   => "/var/lib/mailman/archives/public/",
       "/images/"      => "/usr/share/images/",
)

url.redirect = (
       "^/(index\.html?)?$"    => "http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/overview",
       "^/mailman/?$"          => "/mailman/listinfo"
)

$HTTP["url"] =~ "^/mailman/" {
       cgi.assign = ( "" => "" )
}

See also http://www.gnu.org/software/mailman/mailman-install/node10.html

SpamAssassin

SpamAssassin is installed using the default Ubuntu spamassassin package. A couple of configuration changes were made.

By default, spamd, if enabled, runs as root. To change this:

# adduser --system --no-create-home --group --disabled-password --disabled-login spamd

The following settings were modified in /etc/default/spamassassin:

# Change to one to enable spamd
ENABLED=1

User preferences are disabled, spamd listens on the loopback interface only, and runs as user/group spamd:

OPTIONS="--max-children 5 --helper-home-dir --listen-ip=127.0.0.1 -u spamd -g spamd"

Run spamd with nice level 10:

# Set nice level of spamd
NICE="--nicelevel 10"

TODO

• Mail server configuration fine tuning
• Mail server configuration documentation
• Mailman configuration fine tuning
• Spam filtering (current config?)
• htdig
• Backup MX
• Automatic mailing list index script (also, 404 handlers, robots.txt...)
• Migrating existing mailing lists, with announcements
• Redirection of old URL to new
• DNS Resolver
• Monitoring
• Backups

Migration

Configuration files can be copied to lily just fine. Variables that may need to be changed are:

• reply_to_address
• host_name

Most of these can probably be done automatically. Not present in the dumped list configuration file is the list's URLs. A fix_url withlist script is provided to change this.

Archives can be copied by just transferring the .mbox file, and then rebuilding the archive from scratch with arch --wipe.

Old setup

Mailing lists live in /usr/local/mailman/ on goeje.

The current setup:

• Does not use VERP
• Does not use a separate lists domain

The templates for list messages etc. are in /usr/local/mailman/template/<langcode>; these can be customised per-list by copying them to /usr/local/mailman/lists/<listname>/<langcode>/ and editing them. Make sure they're still writable by Apache otherwise the mailman web interface doesn't work! (this means they have to be owned by group mailman and be g+w)

To add a new list:

 /usr/local/mailman/bin/newlist

Ensure /usr/local/mailman/aliases.mailman is up-to-date after doing this, and run newaliases and postfix reload.

The old symlink from /home/mailman to /usr/local/mailman has been removed as of February 15, 2006. Make sure any old directions and config files are updated to reflect this.

List archives are being removed from robots.txt as of November 3, 2006 to reduce annoying complaints about peoples' names appearing on google.

• How to remove a message from mailing list archive
• Mailman-htdig integration for searching