GNU Mailman

GNU Mailman is a computer software application from the GNU Project for managing electronic mailing lists.^[4][5] Mailman is coded primarily in Python and currently maintained by Abhilash Raj.^[1] Mailman is free software, licensed under the GNU General Public License.^[5]

GNU Mailman

Mailman files
Developer(s)	Abhilash Raj[1]
Initial release	July 30, 1999; 25 years ago (1999-07-30)[2]
Stable release	3: 3.3.10[3] / 2024-10-01[±] 2: 2.1.39 / 2021-12-13
Repository	gitlab.com/mailman/mailman
Written in	Mostly Python, some C
Operating system	Unix-like
Available in	Many languages
Type	Mailing list management software
License	3: GPL-3.0-or-later 2: GPL-2.0-or-later
Website	www.gnu.org/software/mailman/

History

A very early version of Mailman was written by John Viega while a graduate student, who then lost his copy of the source in a hard drive crash sometime around 1998.^[6] Ken Manheimer at Corporation for National Research Initiatives (CNRI), who was looking for a replacement for Majordomo, then took over development. When Manheimer left CNRI, Barry Warsaw took over. Mailman 3, the first major new version in over a decade, was released in April 2015.^[7]

Web administration interface for GNU Mailman 2.1

Features

Mailman runs on most Unix-like systems, including Linux. Since Mailman 3.0 it has required Python-3.4 or newer.^[8] It works with Unix-style mail servers, such as Exim, Postfix, Sendmail and qmail. Features include:

• A customizable publicly-accessible Web page for each maillist.
• Web application for list administration, archiving of messages, spam filtering, etc. Separate interfaces are available for users (for self-administration), moderators (to accept/reject list posts), and administrators.
• Support for multiple administrators and moderators for each list.
• Per-list privacy features, such as closed-subscriptions, private archives, private membership rosters, and sender-based posting rules.
• Integrated bounce detection and automatic handling of bouncing addresses.
• Integrated spam filters
• Majordomo-style email based commands.
• Support for virtual domains.
• List archiving. The default archiver provided with Mailman 2 is Pipermail,^[9] although other archivers can be used instead. The archiver for Mailman 3 is HyperKitty.^[10]

See also

• Free and open-source software portal

• List of mailing list software
• Electronic mailing list