[Wylug-help] Mailing list software tutorial

[Roger]

Philip Wyett wrote:
> On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 23:09 +0000, Roger wrote:
>> A group I'm working with wants a mailing list (akin to this one) to 
>> exchange info.
>>
>> The software choice seems simple; Mailman is packaged for CentOS, but 
>> apparently nothing else.
>>
>> The thing is, while I've subscribed to enough lists to know that's what 
>> they need, I've virtually no idea what's going on in the background.
>>
>> The Mailman documentation seems to assume I know more than I do (I don't 
>> follow what a lot of it is on about), so does anyone know of a tutorial 
>> that might bring me up to speed?
>>
>> Roger
>>
> 
> I gave up on RHEL and CentOS primarily because of RPM and many
> assumptions they do make. To see an Ubuntu guide:
> 
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Mailman

Thanks for that, Phil, but I'm afraid that still needs more knowledge 
than I have.

I do have Apache installed (I'm quite comfortable with editing 
httpd.conf by hand, to do what I'm already doing: virtual-serving a few 
sites).

I also have Postfix installed, but only by the skin of my teeth did I 
get that configured to download my email and make it available by IMAP 
over my Intranet to my workstations.

I can install Mailman in an instant using Yum.

Finally, as per my initial post, I know - at least when seen from a 
user's point of view - what I want to achieve.

Unfortunately, that guide seems to describe a single purpose: installing 
all the above only to serve mailing lists.  It has no general 
description of WTF is going on so that I can merge that with what I'm 
doing already.

The MTA is my principle weakness.  As above, I managed to get Postfix to 
handle my own email, but largely by trial and error (when the errors 
stopped happening, I stopped fiddling - I never really understood what I 
was doing - so I forget what I did.)

What I'm after is a basic explanation of how the various elements 
interact so that I understand what the necessary REconfiguration does.

A simple 'cook book' guide to things seems as likely to screw up what 
I'm already doing as to get the new project to work.

Roger

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