I have decided to experiment with Mailman 3 to host mailing lists. I wish to use standard Debian packages where possible. In doing so I have experienced a number of problems so thought it might be worth while documenting them. This is still work in progress and only partially complete and may not be 100% fault free.
As an experiment I wish to use the domain lists.roxburgh.net to support my trials.
The first step was to install the Debian packages - apt install mailman3-full. I was asked if I wanted to configure a database with dbconfig-common. As this is only a trial I said yes and then chose sqlite3. This happened twice. I then edited some of the configuration files.
/etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg
/etc/mailman3/mailman-web.cfg
Then restart both services - systemctl restart mailman3 mailman3-web.
Finally for this part, create a superuser using mailman-web createsuperuser
You need to configure apache for the Mailman website. Initially I used the folowing virtual host configuration. Also you need to set up an A record in your DNS for the lists domain.
<VirtualHost *:443>
ServerName lists.roxburgh.net
ServerAdmin web@roxburgh.net
SSLEngine On
SSLCertificateFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.roxburgh.net/cert.pem
SSLCertificateChainFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.roxburgh.net/chain.pem
SSLCertificateKeyFile /etc/letsencrypt/live/www.roxburgh.net/privkey.pem
Alias /mailman3/favicon.ico /var/lib/mailman3/web/static/postorius/img/favicon.ico
Alias /mailman3/static /var/lib/mailman3/web/static
<Directory "/var/lib/mailman3/web/static">
Require all granted
</Directory>
<IfModule mod_proxy_uwsgi.c>
ProxyPass /mailman3/favicon.ico !
ProxyPass /mailman3/static !
ProxyPass /mailman3 unix:/run/mailman3-web/uwsgi.sock|uwsgi://localhost/
</IfModule>
</VirtualHost>
The standard configuration can be found here. I had to make one change to the MM3_HOME macro. Also you need to add +mm_domains to your local_domains list.
Main Configuration
domainlist mm_domains=lists.roxburgh.net
MM3_LMTP_PORT=8024
MM3_HOME=/var/lib/mailman3
MM3_UID=list
MM3_GID=list
MM3_LISTCHK=MM3_HOME/lists/${local_part}.${domain}
Router Configuration
mailman3_router:
driver = accept
domains = +mm_domains
require_files = MM3_LISTCHK
local_part_suffix_optional
local_part_suffix = \
-bounces : -bounces+* : \
-confirm : -confirm+* : \
-join : -leave : \
-owner : -request : \
-subscribe : -unsubscribe
transport = mailman3_transport
Transport Configuration
mailman3_transport: driver = smtp protocol = lmtp allow_localhost hosts = localhost port = MM3_LMTP_PORT rcpt_include_affixes = true
You also need to set up an MX record in your DNS for your list domain.
Once you have set up your server it is not clear what to do next, as I could find no documentation. There are two separate online interfaces to Mailman. /mailman3 takes you to the Mailman services Postorious and Hyperkitty. /mailman3/admin takes you to the Django admin console. After some experimentation I hit on the following basic configuration.
First use the Django console to set up details of your website domain. In the console select Sites under the Sites heading. Select Add site then enter the site URL and name.
In the Mailman service first create a new domain, referencing the site you just created as Web Host. Then create a list under that domain.
Then check that a directory exists for your new list under /var/lib/mailman3/lists/. You can then start to send messages to your new list.
The following paragraphs details problems I experienced as I started to test Mailman.
My inbox started to get flooded with emails from Mailman, one every minute. These started with the message -
"Retry and timeout are misconfigured. Set retry larger than timeout, failure to do so will cause the tasks to be retriggered before completion".
Following a link in the email I found that I needed to add the following to /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py. This is Debian bug 1051618
Q_CLUSTER = {'orm': 'default',
'retry': 360,
'save_limit': 100,
'timeout': 300,
'workers': 2}
Even with the previous problem fixed I continued to receive emails every minute. These contained lots of lines saying something like -
"django_mailman3.Profile: (models.W042) Auto-created primary key used when not defining a primary key type, by default 'django.db.models.AutoField'. HINT: Configure the DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD setting or the DjangoMailman3Config.default_auto_field attribute to point to a subclass of AutoField, e.g. 'django.db.models.BigAutoField'"
This is Debian bug 1051617. This fault means Mailman3 is not viable as a live system, genuine problems would be lost in a sea of rubbish.`
Eventually I found a solution on the Internet, although I now can't find it again to give a link. The solution is to add the following to /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py.
DEFAULT_AUTO_FIELD='django.db.models.AutoField'
Posting messages worked, in that they were forwarded to list members. However nothing appeared in the Hyperkitty archive screens. It took me a while to resolve this as it turned out there were three different problems.
/etc/mailman3/mailman-hyperkitty contains the following snippet of code which needs to be appended to /etc/mailman3/mailman.cfg.
[archiver.hyperkitty] class: mailman_hyperkitty.Archiver enable: yes configuration: /etc/mailman3/mailman-hyperkitty.cfg
/etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py contains a value MAILMAN_ARCHIVER_KEY. This needs to be copied in to /etc/mailman3/mailman-hyperkitty.cfg as the value for api_key, without the quotation marks.
The connection between the archiving system and the main system uses http on localhost and couldn't happen because I had set the site up using https. There may be a cleverer way to resolve this but I set up a second virtual host. This was the same as the one above except that the SSL lines are removed and the first two lines are as below.
<VirtualHost 127.0.0.1:80 [::1]:80>
ServerName localhost
On the archive screens the site name was shown as example.com. To fix this add the following line to /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py.
SITE_ID = 0
I set up a second web site on the same server with its own lists, expecting each site would only show it's lists. In fact both sites showed all lists. This can be fixed by adding the following to /etc/mailman3/mailman-web.py.
FILTER_VHOST = True