Is installing mailman a good idea?

[dragonslayr]

SYSTEM INFORMATION
OS type and version:	Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS
Webmin version:	1.973
Virtualmin version:	6.16
Related products version:	RECOMMENDED

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It doesn’t appear there is real support for mailman. I’ve searched and see some trying to get it to work with issues. So my question is: Should I consider it? I would like to, but do not want to enter into something that will always cause us grief.

Thanks in Advance!

[Joe]

If you need to run mailing lists (not mass mail for marketing, it isn’t meant for that at all and does not do anything useful if that’s what you’re trying to do), Mailman is fine. It doesn’t get talked about much because mailing lists just aren’t a very popular form of discussion tool, anymore. They’ve been replaced by forums (like Discourse that we run here).

The only common problem I can think of is that people often believe the virtualmin-mailman module is mailman. But, that’s not the case. The Virtualmin Mailman module manages Mailman, it isn’t Mailman.

So…be sure to install Mailman itself, and then install the virtualmin-mailman module. I think the module tells you about anything that’s missing (on some distros, just installing mailman does not create the first mailing list, which is mandatory to start the service).

I think you can also use the virtualmin command to set it up (once both the module and mailman itself is installed), though it hasn’t been touched/tested in three years, since we removed mailman from the default installation:

# virtualmin config-system --include Mailman

On distros that provide a default list as part of the package (I don’t remember which ones), this isn’t necessary. Really, mailman when installed from a package is silly easy to make work…I don’t know how/why so many people find it hard to make work. It’s usually just one or two steps.