fplanque: dev blog

Installing the mailman package on Debian is easy... but at some point, you gotta run into exim4 configuration again!

Fact is exim4 does not by default and strongly discourages using piping to programs in /etc/aliases... which unfortunately is the way mailman likes to get its incoming mail. Bleh!

After having tried a gazillion different things I finally managed to get it to work by adding the following into /etc/exima4/exim4.conf.template ...

...

This is derived from http://www.exim.org/howto/mailman21.html .

Top of the file:

# Home dir for your Mailman installation -- aka Mailman's prefix
# directory.
# By default this is set to "/usr/local/mailman"
# On a Red Hat/Fedora system using the RPM use "/var/mailman"
# On Debian using the deb package use "/var/lib/mailman"
# This is normally the same as ~mailman
MM_HOME=/var/lib/mailman
#
# User and group for Mailman, should match your --with-mail-gid
# switch to Mailman's configure script.
# Value is normally "mailman"
MM_UID=list
MM_GID=list
#
# Domains that your lists are in - colon separated list
# you may wish to add these into local_domains as well
domainlist mm_domains=ns34611.ovh.net:b2evo.net:b2ee.com
#
# -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
#
# These values are derived from the ones above and should not need
# editing unless you have munged your mailman installation
#
# The path of the Mailman mail wrapper script
MM_WRAP=MM_HOME/mail/mailman
#
# The path of the list config file (used as a required file when
# verifying list addresses)
MM_LISTCHK=MM_HOME/lists/${lc::$local_part}/config.pck

Make sure you check the user and group here, as an error there will result in a very hard to detect error (no explicit log message anywere). I used "list" because that group of the handler ( /var/lib/mailman/mail/mailman ).

In the router section (after the system_aliases sub-section):

mailman_router:
  driver = accept
  domains = +mm_domains
  require_files = MM_LISTCHK
  local_part_suffix_optional
  local_part_suffix = -admin : \
     -bounces   : -bounces+* : \
     -confirm   : -confirm+* : \
     -join      : -leave     : \
     -owner     : -request   : \
     -subscribe : -unsubscribe
  transport = mailman_transport

At the end of the transport section:

mailman_transport:
  driver = pipe
  command = MM_WRAP \
    '${if def:local_part_suffix \
      {${sg{$local_part_suffix}{-(\\w+)(\\+.*)?}{\$1}}} \
      {post}}' \
    $local_part
  current_directory = MM_HOME
  home_directory = MM_HOME
  user = MM_UID
  group = MM_GID

I hope this can save some time to someone, someday...