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Date:      Sun, 2 Feb 1997 09:53:27 +0100
From:      j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch)
To:        eistal@cyf-kr.edu.pl
Cc:        freebsd-ports@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Mailing lists
Message-ID:  <Mutt.19970202095327.j@uriah.heep.sax.de>
In-Reply-To: <32F28E74.507A@cyf-kr.edu.pl>; from Janusz Stal on Feb 1, 1997 01:29:40 %2B0100
References:  <32F28E74.507A@cyf-kr.edu.pl>

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As Janusz Stal wrote:

> I have FreeBSD 2.1 release.
> I'd like to install on my machine a mailing list like this.
> Is in port collection any program for that purpose ?

Dien dobry,

well, the basic program to run a mailing list is sendmail (which is
part of the base system already).  It allows for creating alias
databases, and that's about all that is _required_ for a mailing list.
You can even use include files for the list aliases, so if you don't
want to have root privileges required for maintaining the list, put
the list members in an include file, and chown this to your list
maintainer(s).  Since everybody is allowed to run newaliases(1), this
will finally rebuild the actual alias database.

For a small list (< 50 participiants) with a rather low subscription/
unsubscription rate, this is a usable solution, and it avoids the
overhead of any third-party software.

In your /etc/aliases, add the following:

# the list itself:
my-list:		:include:/usr/lists/my-list
# the list maintainers:
owner-my-list:		root,eistal
my-list-request:	root,eistal

The owner-my-list alias will cause <owner-my-list> to appear as the
envelope sender address in resent mails, so error messages will be
sent to these persons rather than to the originator who sent the mail
to the list (who normally can't do anything about those people
subscribed on a list).

Mailing list names by convention contain a dash in their name, so
somebody seeing that address can immediately find out about its list
nature.  The convention is that the address of the maintainers of a
list can be derived from the list name by appending a ``-request''.
Sadly, only few people seem to know this these days, see the various
`subscribe' messages that go out to the FreeBSD lists.


If your list becomes more busy, you might consider using something
like majordomo, which can be found in the ports.  At the plus side,
you get automatic subscription/unsubscription handling.  At the minus
side, you've got more files involved into the processing, and you need
some time to get the initial setup running.

-- 
cheers, J"org

joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE
Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)



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